Each year, the Washingtonian magazine presents a list of the best lawyers in the Washington metropolitan area. In the December 2013 issue, the Washingtonian magazine identified 31 attorneys in Montgomery County, Maryland, as being the best family and divorce lawyers.
The Washingtonian magazine candidly concedes that its methodology of its selection process is neither perfect nor scientific. Instead of surveying a random sample of clients or attorneys in Montgomery County, the magazine sent a survey to perhaps a 100 pre-selected family attorneys to identify whom they deemed the best among their peers. The magazine’s identification of the best family and divorce attorneys in Montgomery County was pre-ordained by its selection bias.
The other problem with the Washingtonian’s selection process is that it does not take into account whether the attorney is cost-effective or efficient. Wouldn’t you want to retain an attorney who can obtain the same results for half of the cost?
I know some of the attorneys who were identified as the best family and divorce divorces by the Washingtonian magazine. You would not want to retain any of them to handle a routine divorce or family matter. To justify their high fees and overhead, these attorneys typically churn clients’ files by performing unnecessary legal services. These lawyers regularly bill $100,000 to $250,000 to their clients. The excessiveness of these lawyers’ fees is evidenced by the fact that the average contested divorce costs about $24,000.
If you want to spend a small fortune on your divorce, then by all means retain a lawyer identified by the Washingtonian magazine. If you don’t have a small fortune to spend on your routine divorce, then read my post on how to select the best family attorney: https://stewartsutton.com/how-to-retain-the-best-family-or-divorce-attorney-in-montgomery-county-maryland.
