[ikeboy]

There's a big difference between a lawyer who will take a case and a lawyer who can handle a case.

I agree 100%. One thing I do is look for similar cases and contact the lawyer on the winning side.

The "formulas" do save you money, though. Would you rather pay 5k for them to use an existing template slightly edited, or 25k to write a complaint from scratch? It depends on the case, there is no right answer.

You can also literally just look up a lawyer's cases on PACER and see how they write, see if they've won, and use your judgement as to whether they're an effective advocate. If you're dealing with a big case, this is absolutely worth doing.

[ta1234567890]

You have excellent points, and I hope I had known them many years ago.

One of the main issues for non-lawyers is that the first time you need to hire a lawyer, you have no idea what you are doing, so there's a huge learning curve and a lot of information asymmetry to overcome.