But what about an attorney's actual track record? Isn't that important too?
Sure it is, but sometimes beauty really is only "skin deep", as the oldie-but-goodie goes. In other words, you can't measure success by the bottom line unless you really understand what it took to get there.
For example, let's say you go to a website, like this one, and see cases that settled for large sums of money. Pretty good, right? Maybe, maybe not. It may tell you that the lawyer or law firm has handled its share of substantial cases, but it doesn't necessarily tell you much about whether or not they did a good job, and it tells you absolutely nothing about what your case is worth, because every case, and every client, is different.
After all, suppose the client that settled for 2 million dollars should have gotten 4, or the client that got a 10 million dollar jury award wound up with a fraction of that after the case got appealed to a higher Court. If so, maybe that lawyer or law firm didn't do such a good job after all. The point is that reading a short summary about a substantial case may only give you a glimpse at the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help me God....
