Can anyone tell me how my defendant should select a super solicitor please?

[henone]

First crime novel in progress and I now need to provide one of my characters with very competent legal advice on the alleged offence. Of course, repeat offenders all know who is best in any given city and have said advisor on speed dial, but if a character has always been of good character and has no previous encounters with the police or the criminal law, beyond settling for the duty solicitor, how might they go about finding good legal advice and representation? Are solicitors ranked in any way? All I can find is the Law Society's website where practices are listed. Please steer me in the right direction for a plausible search method. Very many thanks.

When I say fantasy lists I mean 80% of the solicitors we see are the same faces, they are real local criminal solicitors. We just have a top few and a bottom few, some are great, some are absolutely awful.

@JustanotherJP, I like this idea.

Back later... must feed the troops.

He would ask the firm dealing with his agriculture stuff and they would recommend one.

A good tip if it's based in a small town is to check the local papers for latest crime being reported in it. I live in a small city and it seems to be the same names of solicitors popping up over and over again representing folk when the cases are reported in the press.

@JustanotherJP same for police. Some I'd rather represent myself than accept, others I'd be begging to take me on 😁

The boring answer is that he has legal defence cover on his NFU policy.

The more fun answer is that he rings the solicitor who does his land contracts, which says "completely out of my league old chap, but Binky, who I was at Balliol with happens to defend the homicidal gentry rather well, I'll give him a buzz for you". That gives you a top flight highly experienced solicitor and barrister.

Or a variant on a PP's suggestion, he rings a County chum who sits as a magistrate and asks him/her for advice and she/he says "for god's sake don't stick with the duty solicitor, I had to remind him of the name of his client last week and my colleagues frequently have to cough to wake him up. But young/old Boggins from Smith, Jones and McSweeney always seems terribly on the ball, even on the most hopeless cases. If I was found clutching a bloody knife over the dismembered corpse of my grandmother, that's who I'd want to defend me." That could give you a competent solicitor of any level of experience. Assuming you want your protagonist to have a competent lawyer of course.

I agree that a lay person would be unlikely to use Legal 500 or Chambers.

I'd suggest he reads about a case in the paper where the defendant gets off against the odds and tracks down the solicitor who represented him or her.

If not embarrassed, he’d ask around his friends and family does anyone know how to find a good lawyer and someone would ask thier dad / sister etc and the mesaage would come back to look at Chambers.

chambers.com/legal-guide/uk-1

If he’s used a lawyer before, eg bought property, he mught ask his property lawyer for a recommendation.

If he is trying to keep things quiet he’d google ‘good criminal lawyer’ pick someone local to him and they might be good might be rubbish.

Interesting that you don't think the Legal 500 would be used by lay people, as I've used it several times (and I'm not a lawyer) and recommended it to others, both professionally and privately...

I don't mind being unusual though😏

He phones the solicitor he uses for his land and agricultural work and they either refer to someone in house or recommend another specialist practice.

The type of firm that does land and agricultural work are likely to be able to deal with criminal regulatory matters like health and safety prosecutions but may not deal with the nitty gritty of theft, assaults and murders. They would almost certainly not have a white collar crime specialist for major fraud or similar. They could probably recommend someone though and that would be a realistic way to be put in direct contact with someone shit hot rather than whoever is free at a big firm listed in the legal 500.

Come on now…. Surely he employs a “wrong un” somewhere…or there’s some moody, mysterious tenant who’s just out of prison ( keeps himself to himself but is good with the pigs). People who are arrested often know who the good solicitors are. Unless of course he’s been arrested for murder in which case I wouldn’t be taking advice from the local scrote.

It needs to be a juicy crime though because otherwise a shit hot criminal lawyer isn’t going to be that interested.

Someone at the Freemasons' Lodge will know who to recommend.

Tweet Colleen Rooney?

😀

A distant cousin is in London, is a solicitor/married to one and he asks them to recommend someone? Could take your plot out of a rural landscape as well, show how countryfied he is when he has to go to London to meet his solicitor/barrister type.

you need to make the method in which he finds someone really interesting. I’d be inclined to have him hang around the local crown court and look for someone who looks happy when they come out of the building. Follow them to the pub where they’re ordering a bottle of champagne and ask who they used

How he goes about it will very much depend on the seriousness of the offence. If he's arrested for murder, he's going to need to get a move on with making a decision about representation, and he's going to have almost no chance to do any research. If he's arrested for something lower level, has the duty solicitor and is then bailed, he'll have more of a chance to shop around.

If it's a murder, chances are you wouldn't have a 'wet behind the ears' duty solicitor dealing with the actual interview. Ex criminal lawyer here, and murder cases tend to involve a lot of urgent phonecalls within a firm, working out who to send to deal with it. Even if you were on duty overnight as a fairly new duty solicitor, you'd probably try to raise one of the partners to give them a heads-up. Given how long it takes to get ready for interview in serious cases, the chances of the person on duty overnight actually having to go and deal with it would be minimal.

I appreciate you're going to be trying to meet reader expectations, but if there's any way to avoid the 'settling for the duty' narrative, duty solicitors everywhere would thank you for it! It comes up so often in books/TV and it's really not a thing in real life. You have to do an extra qualification to go on the duty rotas, and those rotas are most firms' bread-and-butter. As a criminal solicitor, you have almost no value to a firm if you're not duty qualified. So there's only so wet-behind-the-ears a duty solicitor can be. You do get a few who go straight to specialist work without going down the duty route, but that usually means they aren't experienced in the frontline work. I sometimes had very expensive city-type solicitors rock up at the police station to try and take over a high-profile case, only for it to turn out that they weren't actually police station accredited, or turn up in the mags court and seriously piss off the bench with their incompetence. There's a lot of misinformation floating about regarding the status of duty solicitors, but if 'criminal solicitor' and 'duty qualified' were two circles in a venn diagram, there'd be almost complete overlap. You could always have people telling him he doesn't want the duty solicitor and to find someone else, but the duty actually turns out to be the shit-hot lawyer he wants!

How old is your defendant? I'm thinking if he is 50+ he will have friends who have children who have gone through uni and either one is a lawyer or married to one.

Local 'innocence project' at nearest uni that has been in the paper. I doubt they would represent him but could have contacts.

Meets another person in custody who has a good solicitor. Maybe it's busy so they are sharing a cell.

Depending on the set up a 'friendly custody sergeant' who slips him a card (I'm fairly sure it would be against the rules but you can work something into the story). It could be someone who started a law degree and then swapped to criminology or a policing degree (you would need to check the dates because it is quite new) but still has friends in various branches of the law.

Could a semi-retired shit-hot lawyer have coincidentally moved into the town / village where your character lives?

I like that.

Maybe s/he has rented a property the main character owns, maybe after a divorce or a difficult case.

OP

When will you be finished? I'm getting invested in this.

It's going to be a while to complete draft one @sashh and then a second, probably followed by the search for an agent and/or publisher. So you might want to keep the lid on the pot for a bit!

I shall be sure to acknowledge this thread! Everyone has been extremely helpful and generous with their time and input.