When You Shouldn’t Try to Represent Yourself

In the last post I talked about the general question of whether or not you should consider being your own lawyer – whether you could really represent yourself in court or otherwise. In that post I referred to the fact that there were some cases where is was not appropriate.

I’d like to talk a little more about that today.

To borrow from what is usually a stupid analogy, but in a few cases can have merit, “would you perform surgery on yourself?” Of course not and there are some cases where you clearly need the services of an attorney.

Let’s look at some. Examples of cases better handled by lawyers:

Criminal cases that could land you in jail, or with a serious criminal record. Makes sense! Losing a case involving some money is one thing. Losing a case and spending years in jail with your life on the scrapheap – a little different.

Juvenile Justice Case. Same thing applied to your child. The potentially devastating results to a child’s entire life from getting into these squalid systems make it imperative that an attorney, knowledgeable in these matters be retained as early in the proceedings as possible.

Complex Civil Case. Some case are just so complicated in terms of the numbers of witnesses and documents that you could never really hope to keep up. Small firm and solo practice lawyers even avoid these as being too demanding of resources.

There are other cases that are just not suited to being handled without an attorney. At Be Your Own Lawyer while we suggest that with help you can handle most legal matters on your own, we’re at the same time realistic. One of the things we offer, at no cost to you, is to take a look at a case and tell you upfront if its something that you’d be better of hiring and attorney for.