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It depends on the kind of case. In the personal injury area, for example, say another party has injured you, those are typically contingent cases, paid on contingency. There's no fee, except for out of pocket costs: filing fees, servers processed, deposition costs, and things like that. We don't get paid for our time in a personal injury case unless and until we get you money in a settlement.

In a civil case where one company is suing another company over infringement of their rights, or terminating your contract, or another issue where rights have been violated for example, it's an hourly charge. The total would depend on how strenuously the defendant (the person or other entity being sued) wants to defend it.

In a family law case, for example, the next area is an hourly one, where you're getting a divorce, or you're suing for modification of a time that you get to see your child, or how often, or how much you're paying in child support. Those things are all hourly billed type cases. It depends on the case.

To help you plan for your estate, we generally have a flat fee schedule of anywhere between $300 and $750, depending on what things you’d need to get done. This morning I had a beneficiary deed because one of my clients had bought a different house, sold the other one and now she needs a new beneficiary deed. I just charged them $50 plus recording cost which is $30 now for that. We will also provide a living trust as part of our estate planning for clients.

While on the estate planning topic, a mental health power of attorney is one document that we strongly recommend having in place now. However, many people don’t have that if they had estate planning done years ago. I've got the forms; I just fill in names, get people to sign them, and get the filing done. It doesn't consume a lot of time and we just ask for a token charge.

The answer depends on what case it is. There are cases that must go to the court of appeals. But my general rule of thumb is, depending on how complicated your family case is, it could be over in six months if everybody agrees. It can take two years and cost a lot of money if everybody doesn't agree and everybody wants to fight.

In the civil area, and they changed the rules this year, put different tiers together, they call them, based on the amount of money you're seeking in the civil case. Their effort is to try to expedite smaller cases. Generally, you're looking at nine months to a year on small cases, but it can extend and larger cases can last two, three, four, five years.

Criminal cases, generally if you don't take a plea and you want to go to trial, you're looking at probably a couple of years, again depending on the case specifics. The courts try to resolve them within one year, but I've got some that don't get resolved in one year.

We had one case for example, a murder case that was about five years from the time that the person was arrested until they finally went to trial. It varies significantly, depending on the case and the amount of dollars. Quite frankly, the prosecution and/or the defense can prolong cases too, based on their behavior and how much they want to fight you.

The traffic accident injury cases, for example, you have to wait until the person is fully recovered, and they can be very complicated. If it's just soft tissue stuff that gets well within three or four months, which a lot of them are, then you're probably looking at another six months to finalize. Insurance companies require us to put together a huge package, send it to them, and then we negotiate. Sometimes the negotiation takes a while. If you don't get it settled, you've got to file a lawsuit, so then you potentially need to add more time to it.

It depends on what issues you've got. We helped one fellow who has what they call drop foot after a surgery on his back. It appeared that it was caused by the surgeon clipping a nerve that he shouldn't have clipped. This person will probably never fully recover because the nerve just can’t be fixed. You've got cases where all we can get for the people is money because nobody can physically help them get well.

If you're talking about a person that was molested as a teenager by someone, various people have different recovery abilities. Some never recover from the PTSD that developed from those experiences. Some do a very good job of recovering, but still harbor that stuff and will always have to live with the psychological effects.

On the other hand, I've got other past clients that come out of an injury caused by another in similar situations, start a business, meet somebody, get married, have families, and they're doing great.

One of the things we do our best in is to help you get whatever treatment you need. For example, I had one client in counseling with a psychologist for eight or 10 years. He never could resolve it in his own mind, even though he got money, and he was able to buy a house, and so forth, and so on. But he couldn't keep a job because he couldn't concentrate, forget to show up to work. Everything is variable, depending on the person, the harm they've incurred, and whether they look at these episodes as just "one day of my life and I'm not going to ruin the rest of it because of that."

It varies significantly across the board, depending on the person that you are, what support you have at home, so forth, so forth. Some people have a problem after they've spent $30,000 in legal fees trying to sue somebody for harming them, and they're only able to recover $10,000.

They look at that and say ... Some people take that as a really bad result. Other people say, "I wanted to bring this lawsuit against them, and I wanted to show them that they were wrong, and whatever I get, it'll show them they were wrong. And whatever it costs me, is not my problem." I have some of those as well.

So you can see from these examples that we do everything humanly possible to help you get your life back.  One really important thing we do in litigation and other pertinent cases is help people determine whether the potential risks are worth the reward. And we don’t have a problem if you say no to us, you don’t wish to proceed because the potential for reward isn’t worth the time and money that needs to be invested in the case.

We've been helping people for over 45 years. Over all that time, I've never have had a bar complaint. I did get sued once when I had insurance because they were after my malpractice insurance. They took us to trial, and they lost, and the jury awarded us our attorney's fees and costs. That’s the only time I've ever had anybody ever complain, and that was a made-up case to try to gouge the insurance company for the insurance money.

We've got entire families that have hired us repeatedly. We've got people from different parts of the world that send their friends to us when they have a problem. Just got a call from a young lady whose father was in a traffic accident, who was referred to us by one of our former traffic accident client cases. That's the way we function. We just don't advertise those people’s names on the website. People get referred to us on a regular basis from somebody that has been happy with whatever we did for them.

The motto of our law firm is "Live The Golden Rule." I'm going to treat you as if I were you and I was asking for you to help me.

That's how simple it is. We don’t just say we live by The Golden Rule; we actually do ... I'll give you an illustration. I've been to the IA court, that's initial appearance court, which is in the basement of the Fourth Avenue jail. They have a court down there at 2, 5, 8 and 11 each in the morning and again in the evening, eight times a day.

Two Friday nights in a row I've been down there getting different clients out of jail. One was a businessman who runs a car repair and sales shop. Another one is a young man who got in a domestic fight with his girlfriend, who's the mother of his child. His parents are very good friends of ours. I know him as well. I didn't sleep at all Friday night.

Here’s the thing with that court - you don't know when they're going to hear the case. You make a trip down there, find out when they're going to do it, and then you have to go back when they're going to do it. But they would do that for me, in my opinion. And I'm their lawyer, what am I going to do? I'm certainly not going to say no.

You can always recover from loss of sleep. But trust is a very difficult concept for a lot of people. The only thing that I can say, is you'll know from the fruit that the tree bears. If I can’t do the case, I will simply tell you I can't do it.

I get calls periodically from areas of the law that I don't particularly want to do, and never really spent any time to learn how to do it, and I just tell them I don't do them. "Do you have anybody you'd recommend?" I've done that a couple three times just in the last 30 days.

Yes, we provide a 30 minute free consultation, and sometimes longer if it's needed.

We don't start charging people until they fill out and sign a rep agreement. In other words, once you decide you're going to hire us, the case begins. Until then there's no fee. Also, personal injury cases only get us paid when you get paid. So there is no fee for our time unless and until the case settles in your favor.

Phone's probably the most efficient way to contact us at 602-989-1759. Although I do check email several times a day, so either way it gets to me. I like to listen to people's voices on the phone though. That way I can tell how they are feeling and whether they are in emergency mode, or if this is something that's been gnawing at them for a while but they're not in a panic.

We will talk a bit on the phone and then we can set up your free consultation if you would like to proceed with that. Then we can listen to you about your potential case in detail and talk about your legal options.

Whatever the hurt is, one of the things I try to tell everybody is this: whatever your circumstances are that you can consider to be needing a lawyer for, the court's the one that puts a label on what that is. Most of the time the people really don't because they only have a vague idea. They only know what’s going on, but not what the court case will actually be called. For example, they may say “Oh, this is a family,” or “I'm fighting with one of my family members.” So don’t worry about what the case may be considered in the court. Our job is to know that – just know that you can feel comfortable telling us your details so we can best figure out how to help you.