What Should I Expect During My Initial Consultation?

It can be kind of scary coming in to talk to an attorney for those who want to come in for an initial consultation at our office. Before the meeting our paralegal will be sending you an intake questionnaire. It’s very important that the intake questionnaire is filled out prior to the meeting. We want to use the hour, hour and a half that we have for the initial meeting to discuss important things. They don’t want you spending the time filling out the questionnaire in the meeting. It’s a waste of your time to have you do that when you’re talking with me.

In the questionnaire, we ask some basic information of who is your family, who is involved, meaning do we have kids, are they minors, are they not, are you married, are you in a civil union? Then we give you some basic rundowns of the documents. For example, there’s a section that says, ‘Medical power of attorney’. Who is making medical decisions for you, if while alive you can’t? You fill out who you would want in order to make those decisions. When you come in, I already have that information. You bring the questionnaire with you and we go over the questionnaire in the meeting. At the meeting, we start formulating the plan, if not finalizing what kind of plan we may do for you. I’ll typically give you some options on what we can do for those plans. From there, you tell me, “I think this plan sounds good”, or “This plan sounds good”, and you make the choice on what option sounds good for you. You can ask any questions that you have remaining at the meeting and from there we’ll move forward.