Trusting Your Attorney

It is crucial to trust your attorney in any type of case whether it is a divorce or other civil suit. However, lawyers are not always honest with their clients nor do they always follow the ethical practices as regulated the bar association of the state. It is always smart to check with your local state bar to see if any prior clients filed complaints the resulted in any type of disciplinary action against your lawyer. Of course it is even smarter to do this before selecting counsel, but most people trust that their lawyer will look out for their best interests. While this is usually the case and most lawyers represent clients to the best of their abilities, unfortunately this is not always true. The same is true of any profession.

The Virginia State Bar Association has a search function the public can use to find out if there are any past or pending disciplinary actions against the attorney. Those who are researching a VA attorney can visit http://www.vsb.org/attorney/attSearch.asp to conduct a search to see if there are any public reprimands or admonitions for a particular attorney. It is important to do more than simply rely on a profile listed on this site or others. I will use a particular attorney that I recently dealt with before looking up his background. Now I wish I looked it up prior to hiring him as counsel.

Click on the “disciplined attorneys” button and then type in the following first and last name: Barry Koch. Note that it will display the associated law firm, date, type of action, and docket number. Clicking on the link provided provides more details regarding this particular case. A synopsis of the case is that the lawyer referenced above failed to act promptly to a client’s matter and failed to communicate with that client regarding the status of representation. Mr. Koch appealed the decision and the board affirms the district committee’s findings of misconduct, but the disciplinary board imposed a sanction less harsh than the original one.

Now this lawyer handles divorce cases in Virginia Beach and other civil matters as well. Considering the plethora of attorneys, I would not have selected and placed trust in this attorney if I knew of this information in advance. Still hindsight is 20/20. However readers can still learn from my mistake. Always conduct a search with the state bar to see if there are any actions other clients placed against your attorney that merited a public disclosure of the complaint. This is true when hiring a Virginia divorce lawyer or counsel for any other matter.

Published by: admin on July 26th, 2009 | Filed under Divorce Attorney Profiles




One Response to “Trusting Your Attorney”

  1. Divorce Lawyer Marketing | Virginia-Divorce-Lawyer.com Says:
    September 5th, 2009 at 9:05 am

    [...] just follow up and do your own homework on the firm afterward. Take a look at our previous post on trusting your attorney to learn other tips finding details about a [...]

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