Hay You, Do You Need(le) A Lawyer?
Finding a criminal defense attorney to help you with a tough situation is . . . a tough situation in its own right. You’re already facing the uncertainty and fear that comes with being charged with a crime, and now you’re about to start calling random strangers with law degrees, unsure of what to expect. You’ve got a lot of questions (and also probably don’t know enough to know about all the questions you DON’T know you have) and zero assurances that the random stranger you call first is competent enough to answer them.
We hear stories from our clients about their search for legal representation, and some of those stories are awful. Without going into detail, they all boil down to the fact that finding the right attorney is like looking for a needle in a haystack – and a lot of these attorneys are just piling on more hay, instead of offering a simple needle. Attorneys who try to scare the heck out of people with horror stories of terrible consequences (some that are almost certainly never going to happen). Attorneys who spend all their time questioning the potential client about how much money they have. Or attorneys who try to immediately start lowering your expectations, anticipating the chance to get paid to plead you out at the first available opportunity.
That’s not how we operate at Ramsay Law Firm. We don’t want to bury you in hay; we want to be the needle you’re looking for. We’ll tell you what the maximum penalty is for the crime you’re charged with – but we have enough experience to tell you the “realistic” worst-case scenario . . . before telling you what we think a reasonable “good outcome” would be. But we don’t even do that until we’ve let you tell us about your case, your concerns, your fears, and your hopes.
Then, we do our best to explain how the court process works (eliminating those uncertainties) and answer the questions you didn’t even think to ask (something that comes with experience). It’s all about providing solutions and answers, not confusion and evasions.
In the end, hiring a criminal defense attorney involves a large amount of trust, something difficult to establish in a phone call. But that’s what happens, dozens of times a day across Minnesota. We want everyone that calls us for legal help to know, by the end of the call, that we not only care about their case but that they can trust us to do everything within our power to get them a good result. We take that trust very seriously.