How to find a good lawyer in Singapore

Finding a good lawyer when in desperate times is not an easy task. A good lawyer provides a service that is difficult to quantify and describe on paper. If we search for a lawyer on Google, we see the webpages and advertisements of the various law firms. Yet, most of us are smart enough to know that we cannot judge the service of a law firm merely from the look of its website. How then, does one go about searching for a lawyer?

What kind of lawyer do you need?

The process of the search depends on what kind of help you need. If you are a large corporation dealing with an extremely complex issue, then you might want to check out the Legal500 rankings for Singapore or for the list of Senior Counsels. Of course, it may not be the cheapest solution, and the rest of this article will not be relevant for you.

If you are a small or medium-sized enterprise, what you need is likely to be a small corporate law firm as the fees are generally lower and the service can be comparable to large firms where the transactions are smaller. Most cases do not demand a massive operation but rather personal advice.

If you are looking to make a will or to get a divorce, look out for small law firms that are used to dealing with the man on the street.

Avenues for finding a lawyer

Where does that leave us? Even after narrowing down the kind of lawyer that you need, there are still many options.

If you’re lucky, you may already know a lawyer or have heard good things about a certain lawyer. Possibly, the next step is finding out whether that lawyer is well-versed in the area of law that you need help in. Still, if you want to compare the service of that lawyer to another one, it is next to impossible.

The next place that you can look to are online forums, where sometimes people post about good lawyers that they have engaged previously. Participants to a forum are anonymous, however, and hence cannot be trusted completely.

Because of the shortage of information online about the various law firms, sometimes the only viable solution for now is to shortlist a few lawyers and then contact them. The shortlist of lawyers can be from word-of-mouth, from forums, from online advertisements, etc.

Choosing a good lawyer

Contact the lawyers with a few questions. This is to test if they have a process in place for the matter that you are seeking them for. That could be an indication that they have handled similar cases before. Ask about which part of the case he will be handling and which parts he will be delegating to a junior or a paralegal. It is not necessarily bad that a junior is handling the case because the cost will be lower, but it is more to see if the lawyer knows what he’s doing. Ask about the estimated fees and the breakdown of the fee estimation.

Besides the fees, the responsiveness and the attitude of the lawyer is also important, since it is a service and you are entrusting him with something very personal. Don’t forget that ultimately, you may want to pay a little more to engage a lawyer that you are personally comfortable with.

Use our Find a Lawyer service

At SingaporeLegalAdvice.com, we have made your job easier with our Find a Lawyer service, where you can see lawyer reviews and contact several lawyers with one enquiry.