Lawyer Success Rates Can Be Manipulated

Virginia traffic lawyers who publish their “success rates” could be manipulating the numbers to make themselves look better.

Video Transcription

Hello, my name’s Andrew Flusche. I’m a Virginia traffic
lawyer. One reason why I can’t stand that attorneys publish
success rates is because those numbers can be doctored and
manipulated quite easily. Let’s look at DUI for example. If I
cherry-picked my DUI clients that I take on, very carefully, it’s
possible that I could have a 100 percent dismiss rate for DUIs.
In other words, I could publish that 100 percent of my DUIs get
dismissed. But would that be accurate and actually tell you
anything about your case? No. Because you don’t know if your
case is one that should be dismissed or not and it could be. But
if you take on a decent number of DUI cases, to use our example,
there’s many that are not going to be dismissed. It’s simply a
fact of the way the law works in Virginia and DUI cases are tough
to have completely dismissed. For example, some jurisdictions
are tougher than others, and so if I stayed out of those tough
jurisdictions, never took a case there, then I might could have a
100 percent dismissal rate. But that doesn’t tell you if your
case is going to get dismissed. And the same thing with judges –
some judges are tougher than others and if I stayed away from the
tough judges, I can maybe keep that dismissal rate up to 100
percent or maybe 90 percent or something. But still, that
doesn’t give you the information that you need to determine
what’s going to happen in your case. And that’s just one reason
why you can see that you can manipulate statistics based on what
cases you take and don’t take. If you take the easy cases, so to
speak, then it’s likely that you could have a much higher
dismissal rate or reduction rate. Whereas, if you take a wide
array of cases, handling clients as they come to you and as they
need help, it’s much less likely that you might have that high of
dismissal rate, because some cases are simply tougher than others
and clients know that. That’s why you need an attorney who will
tell you up front what you’re realistically facing, what the
realistic possible goals in the case are and how you can get
there, and work together to try to get the best outcome for your
specific case. And the best way, as I always say, to find a
great attorney for your case is to check them out online. Check
out their reviews on Google and Avvo and places like that and see
what real past clients have to say.