Law and Justice

Posts Tagged ‘Reasons’

Loss of freedom. Expensive fines. A criminal record. Restrictions on your future employment. If you face criminal charges in Minnesota, the consequences may change your life. You need a criminal defense attorney, and not just any lawyer will do. You’ll want to hire an experienced professional. You’ll require an attorney who knows the ropes in Minnesota — someone with deep knowledge of local laws and the ins-and-outs of the court system.

Here are the top 10 reasons to hire a criminal defense attorney in Minnesota.

1. You will have one person in the criminal justice system you know is on your side. When dealing with judges, prosecutors, the police and witnesses you will benefit from having an experienced professional who’s concerned with your best interests.

2. You will have hired an adviser who knows the local court system. Every court system has its unique aspects. Minnesota is no exception. Your criminal defense attorney will know which local laws are relevant to your case. He or she will examine the facts in the case and identify the evidence that is most effective for your defense.

3. An experienced criminal defense attorney will take the time to understand your case. Your attorney will not let you become just another statistic in the criminal justice system.

4. Hiring a criminal defense attorney means hiring an expert. You’ll have an adviser who understands the fine points of criminal law, especially Minnesota’s legal code. Your attorney will also have access to resources, including investigators and expert witnesses, who can participate in your defense if needed.

5. Your criminal defense attorney will guide you through the maze-like procedures that often surround criminal legal proceedings – entering a plea, attending hearings, obtaining bond, preparing testimony, locating witnesses, and evaluating the evidence.

6. Your attorney will take the lead in negotiations with prosecutors to potentially dismiss or reduce the charges against you. When you hire a qualified, experienced criminal defense attorney who practices in Minneapolis, you will benefit from having an advocate who knows the local prosecutors and has experience negotiating with them. Your attorney will advise you on your best options if you are offered a plea bargain or reduced sentence.

7. If your case goes to trial, your attorney will help you select the best approach, including whether to testify, and if you should request a judge or jury trial.

8. Your attorney will review all of the evidence against you and seek to dismiss anything that is unproven, unfair, or not allowed under Minnesota law.

9. Even if you have to face some consequences, your criminal defense attorney will help you make the strongest case for a reduced or suspended sentence, lower fines, less time on probation or fewer restrictions on your activities.

10. Your criminal defense attorney will allow you to face the Minnesota court system with confidence that you’ve done the most you can to protect yourself. The right to hire an attorney is a basic civil right, one that can help you to preserve your rights and safeguard your future.

The information you obtain from this article is not, nor is it intended to be, legal advice. You should consult an attorney for individual advice regarding your own situation.

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People already in the legal profession, whose fundamental purpose is to help others resolve their legal problems, will endorse the fact that law as a career is intellectually fulfilling carrying ample financial rewards. Law offers you diverse career options and qualified lawyers are in great demand as the legal profession is expanding at a rapid pace. Career consultants say legal profession is extremely lucrative in today’s employment market. Even many non-lawyers earn handsomely in the legal profession. There are also diverse specialization areas in the legal profession for those aspiring for a career in litigation – criminal law, civil law, labor law, family law, corporate law, contract law, international law etc.
There is immense intellectual satisfaction in the legal profession. Constantly in touch with advances in technology, regularly studying the vast bodies of case laws, mastering several issues of the legal importance with logic and clarity, analyzing case studies and statutory law, researching complex legal issues and becoming an adept at oral and written communications – are the intellectual rewards law as a career offers. In a culture that considers high earnings and social status as hallmarks of success, the legal profession has long been regarded as an elite profession commanding all round respect.  As a result, law as a career is one of the most sought-after professions by many.
With globalization, more and more business houses and corporations are expanding their activities beyond international borders through mergers, acquisitions, consolidation and collaboration with foreign institutions. This globalization provides today’s legal professionals with a world view and the opportunity to expand their horizons. The legal profession is continually evolving bringing in its train new challenges and attractive rewards. Law as a career is all about problem-solving and constantly meeting fresh challenges. There is no denying that the legal industry is thriving and now is a great time to embark on law as a career.
Law is an essential part of our everyday life and all of us live in a civilized society and within a legal framework. The law governs our conduct – some unlawful activities and behavior amount to crime; some other actions may be civil wrongs. Law is an ideal choice for anyone wishing to study law at a higher level it is a stimulating field for anyone who wants to know more about the legal framework in which we live. Although many laws have been in force for a long time, some areas of law are constantly changing due to political, technological, international and ethical influences. When you opt for law as a career, you need to be aware of these influences through knowledge of current affairs. Studying law helps to develop knowledge of current affairs.
Since law schools prepares you to be a lawyer, you will need to find out as much as possible about what law as a career is all about before you finally choose to attend a law school. Talk to practicing lawyers, find out what they like and dislike about their professional activities. Find out if they are happy or stressed, challenged, or discontented. Read legal journals and newspapers to find out about the advantages and disadvantages of the legal profession, current trends in hiring, current salary scales, and the nature of the profession.  Once you learn first hand what the practice of law is like, you will be much better prepared to embark on a legal career with confidence.

Going to law school requires time, money, and commitment.  A half-hearted effort just wouldn’t cut it in law school, which is why passion for the field is an important aspect of a law school personal statement.  This is one of the three most important items in your application to law school, along with your LSAT score and GPA.  Your personal statement, or the admission essay, can spell out the difference between getting into the “rejected” pile and the “accepted”—or at least “waitlisted”—list.  

Why is a personal statement a big deal?

Writing your admission essay is the one thing that you have total control over in the application process.  Even if you have outstanding scholastic records and excellent recommendations from your mentors, there are considerable factors that the Admission Board will not be able to evaluate through them.  Passion and dedication are immeasurable, so there is one thing that the Admission Board would consider a deal-breaker: your purpose.  The first thing you should do is to check your motives.  The clearer your motivations for pursuing law school are to you, the easier it will be to write your personal statement.

What are the characteristics of an effective personal statement?

A good personal statement should clearly explain why you want to take up law.  This is why outstanding admission essays often focus on the applicant’s motivation in its discussion.  Be a storyteller and walk the reader through your personal experiences which prompted you to want to become a lawyer.  Make sure that you cite specific examples of activities that you participated in which are relevant to your goals.  Although one of your objectives for writing your personal statement is to stand out from thousands of other applicants, keep in mind that you are applying for law school and not a creative writing course.  Be concise and keep the flow logical and well-organized.  

How do you go about writing a law school personal statement?

Before getting down to writing, learn more about the law school that you would like to study at.  Take note of the principles and achievements that it considers very important.  This is a crucial step, because you need to explain to the Admission Board why you are suited for the law school’s culture and environment.  Highlight personal qualities that match the values which the law school upholds, such as leadership and service.  Go beyond motherhood statements and mention concrete examples.  For instance, you may discuss how you organized an outreach program and what you accomplished during your term as president of the student council.   

Your personal statement should allow the Admission Board to know you as a person, so they can determine how much pressure you can take.  Use sample law school personal statements only as a guide to help you get a better idea of what to include in your own essay.  It would be a big mistake to substitute the contents of the sample essays with your own information.  That would be plagiarism, and it might jeopardize your chance of getting accepted.  Also, avoid padding your essay with achievements that you do not really have.  As long as you know your reasons for pursuing a degree in law quite well, writing them down would not be too difficult a task.

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If there’s one truth in operating a successful, profitable law firm, it’s this: you have to make more than you spend. In order to achieve this, you need clients cycling through your practice on a continuous basis; both new and repeat alike. While that’s obvious enough to see, making it happen is often another story.

Law firm marketing isn’t that much different than marketing any other kind of service business. With that in mind, you set about the task of getting the word out about whom you are, where you can be found and what services you offer. You place ads in local papers, several popular magazines, on the radio and even a few late night television spots. The consummate law firm marketing plan. Much money and time have been invested and anticipation is high. Then it happens: nothing.

Maybe it’s just a time factor. Give it a little more time and you’ll start to see some real results from all your time and money invested in advertising. But today is just like yesterday and after a while there are no real expectations that tomorrow will be any different. Many of your colleagues are doing well. You went to law school with some of them and know first hand they are no smarter than you. What is it they know that you don’t? What is it in their law firm marketing plan that sets them apart from you?

Traditional advertising is one of the least effective forms of law firm marketing. Unfortunately, most lawyers equate marketing with advertising. The result is that you have wasted money and have no new prospective clients to show for it. Here are three major reasons why advertising in the traditional sense does not work.

1. It does not move people along in the sales cycle. It’s only effective in the first stage when the client is getting to know you. It will not increase your likability or sense of trustworthiness.

2. Frequent advertising is too costly for most budgets. In his book “Guerilla Marketing Attack,” Jay Levinson discusses a study conducted on advertising research quoted here in part: “Following a year-long study, researchers concluded that a law firm marketing message must penetrate the mind of a prospect a total of nine times before that prospect becomes a customer.

That’s the good news. The bad news is that for every three times you expose your prospect to your marketing message, it gets missed or ignored two of those times. So you’ve got to put out the good word about your company a total of 27 times in order to make those nine impressions.”

3. Most ads are often poorly designed or written, even to the point of being boring instead of influencing your target market.

With so many other forces vying for the time and attention of your target audience, advertisements live and die by the quality of the ad and the offer it extends. Most law firms list their services or give a couple “reasons” why they are the better law firm. Neither of which does anything to distinguish them from other lawyers in the same practice area.

There are certain advertising strategies you must remember when conducting any form of law firm marketing. For example, the size of your budget must be adequate to meet the demand. Be sure you have a large enough budget to expose your marketing message to your ideal target market. You need to be able to do this repeatedly over the course of the year using the same advertising medium.

In other words, if your advertising medium of choice is the radio, your budget should allow for weekly advertising on the same radio station for a full year. If this is out of your budget range, reduce the size of your market, increase your ad budget or change your advertising medium to a less expensive one.

For example, if you plan to advertise weekly in a local paper, but the largest one in the area is beyond your present budget, start with the weekly suburban paper instead.

What does all this mean? Focus your law firm marketing efforts on methods that actually work. Don’t waste your time and budget on marketing that is not designed to produce the right results. Focus on your target audience, the best way for you to reach them and the most attractive way to present your services in order to keep them.

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According to a comScore study, it was found that 123 million Americans, or 70% of all North American Internet users, watched 7.2 billion videos over the Internet last year! Of course, these numbers have increased by now. However, this shows that videos are extremely powerful and an excellent way to promote your business over the Internet.

So, what exactly does this mean for law forms who want to use the online medium to market their services? Well, it means that the role of videos can’t be ignored in generating new clients. Here are our five reasons why you, as a lawyer, or your law firm must incorporate video advertising as part of your Internet marketing strategy:

Get Closer To Your Prospective Clients: Audio-visual medium is extremely powerful in convincing people to make a purchase or hire a professional to address their needs. A video displayed on your law firm’s site talking about you can really convince members of the audience to contact you. Videos are excellent Internet marketing tools and if made properly can really play a crucial role in convincing the visitor that you or your law firm is the ‘Best choice’ for them. You can also use videos to portray that you are an expert in a particular field of law thereby improving your site’s conversion rate as well as attract the right audience.

Take Advantage of Google’s Video Search Results: Now, Google even offers thumbnails of the videos at the top of the search pages and allows you to watch them within your search results without ever leaving the results page. Since Google is constantly changing and improving their search, adding video results to search results is indeed a welcome improvement.

Get On YouTube Now: Most Internet marketing experts have a common consensus about YouTube’s effectiveness as an excellent promotional platform. YouTube now has 25% of all Google searches share. With over 75% share of video sites in the country, having your firm’s video on YouTube is one of the easiest and most effective Internet marketing methods to greater visibility! Moreover, audiences are also using YouTube like a search engine to find information. In November 2008 alone, 770 million searches were conducted on YouTube.

Upload Videos On Your Site: A well-tested recipe to get an edge over your competition! Anyone seeking a good lawyer will look over multiple sites and then make the contact the shortlisted attorneys and law firms. The decisions are typically made after reviewing your or your firm’s website. However, by uploading videos about yourself and your areas of expertise, you are ensuring visibility, authenticity and instant connection with your prospective client, thereby differentiating yourself from the competition in a unique manner.

Video Marketing Is The New Mantra: Ask any e-marketer worth his name and he’ll tell you that online video marketing really works. Also, videos improve your conversion rates and generate greater targeted traffic.

We suggest that along with SEO, PPC and other online marketing techniques, you must jump on the online video marketing bandwagon for promoting your law practice and gain advantage by being the first few who realized it potential.

There are many reasons why people quit law school – it’s a difficult and taxing time for any students, and thousands quit at the start of their first year. Let’s look at the top 10 reasons why students drop out of law school.

1. Cost – The primary reason that people leave law school is because of the cost. It is very expensive to go to law school. Law school students will amass over $100,000 of student loan debts that they will be paying back for quite some time. While it’s true that lawyers do make a lot of money, they don’t start out that way and these debts can be a little overwhelming.

2. Job competition – Finding a job after law school is very difficult and there is a lot of competition for the best jobs. Jobs at top law firms throughout the country are highly competitive for students just out of school. This is something that even first year law school students learn quickly. Coupled with the massive debt, students are all the more deflated when they find out they will likely be making under $40,000 for the first five years after they are out of school – put this up against more than $100,000 in student loans and you find many students dropping law school for cheaper schooling careers.

3. Hours – Law school takes a lot of time – not only do you have to attend classes, you have to spend hours upon hours cramming the information into your head for the examinations and, eventually, the bar. Many law school students still want to have a social life and find that they don’t have any because of the studying and homework they have to do. As a result, this cycle doesn’t end out of law school – the hours in a law firm are long and arduous too.

4. The Bar Exam – The bar is a brutal exam – two to three days of testing of questions that are hard to answer because it seems a real answer doesn’t exist. The preparation for the bar exam is intense – months of studying and cramming. Over 40 per cent of law students fail the bar on the first try which means doing it all over again in six months. Over 33 per cent of law students fail the bar on the second try.

5. Lack of Applicable Knowledge – Law school focuses on how to make you think like a lawyer, which doesn’t really translate well to the work you will be doing. Many students figure this out in the first term of law school and find out that this isn’t what they want to be doing.

6. The Need for Money – Most law school students need to have a part time job to help pay for school, and work full time during the summer. Breaks aren’t spent having fun partying with friends, rather they are spent working to improve a resume and the time off from work is spent studying and reviewing material.

7. Brutal Competition – Most law school students figure out before they even get to law school that college will be a time of buckling down to get the work done. All students know that it’s imperative to be near the top of the class – those are the students that land the high paying jobs. However, not all students can be at the top of the class so the competition in class is brutal, resulting in a lack of social scene; not to mention the long hours of working and studying that are also cramping their social life style.

8. Difficult Teaching Styles – Many law students can’t take the heat from their professors, who are arrogant and pretentious while they are trying to drill a bunch of information into their heads.

9. Final Examinations – The final exams for any semester are almost as grueling as the bar exam itself.

10. Dealing with Others – many people will ask a law student about law, trying to get lawyer information for free on an issue they are having. Law students can do nothing to stop this endless harassment – it is something they will cope with from friends and family forever. Many can’t take the constant barrage of questions and queries and thusly drop out of law school before it becomes a life long nightmare.

This is just the tip of the iceberg for reasons why law school students leave law school. If you are a law school student, you need to seriously weigh your options – school loan officers don’t care if you drop out – you’ll still have to pay those back. Is dropping out worth it?

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