How do you find the attorney who is right for you? For instance, if you need a Last Will and Testament drafted or if your family member is in a nursing home, how do you find the attorney who can best assist you with your problem?

This week I found out that the National Elder Law Foundation certified me to be a Certified Elder Law Attorney (CELA). There are 76,796 licensed attorneys in New Jersey and only 32 are CELAs, so it’s no small accomplishment.

But do such credentials ensure you that you are hiring the right lawyer for your elder law issue? As much as it dismays me to say it, not necessarily.

Finding the right attorney, to some extent, is like finding the right home contractor to make improvements to your home. If you don’t know which one to choose, you’ll probably turn to the one whose name you’ve heard the most – perhaps you’ve seen their advertisement in the phone book or in the paper, perhaps a friend or relative mentioned his name. Either way, you don’t know this person, so you’ll have to try their services out before you actually know if they’re the right fit for you.

Unlike home contractors, most lawyers offer consultations with potential clients. Some charge no consultation fee, some charge a minimal fee. In most cases, if the lawyer charges a minimal consultation fee, he’ll credit the consultation fee against the fee for services, if you retain him. So, for instance, if the lawyer quotes you a $400 charge for the services he is to provide, he’ll credit the $100 consultation fee against that $400 charge.

In my opinion, you might want to look for a lawyer who either charges a consultation fee or screens, to some extent, potential clients before he meets them. Why do I say that? Because if a lawyer will take time out of his day to meet with any person that calls his office for an appointment, he has too much time on his hands – and that’s not a good thing.

Now, there are exceptions to this. For instance, if the lawyer is experienced in his field because he has worked for another lawyer for some years and now he has opened up his own practice, he might talk with any person who calls. This may also depend on the field of law in which the lawyer practices.

For instance, a personal injury attorney might take ten minutes out of his day to talk with a potential client on the phone about an auto accident before either passing on the case or scheduling a meeting with the client, because personal injury attorneys, typically, do not have volume businesses. A personal injury attorney is looking for a “good case,” not necessarily a large volume of cases.

Lawyers in my field, however, are looking for a large number of clients. For instance, I’d like to draft a Will for every person in New Jersey. (Dare to dream!)

When you meet – or talk – with the lawyer, you’ll want to try and gauge how well he answers your questions. This doesn’t mean that the lawyer answers your questions the way you wanted the questions answered – in fact, it often means that the lawyer dispels misconceptions that you brought to the meeting.

Lawyers who know their field have a certain free-flow of thought on the matter. They see the potential answer to your questions and numerous ancillary issues that may or may not alter the answer.

I’m not saying that an experienced attorney is always right. Lawyers – like doctors, engineers, and carpenters – make mistakes. But an experienced person knows how to recover from his mistakes.

For example, a professional baseball player doesn’t play every game flawlessly, but the mistakes he makes don’t cause him to question his abilities and he quickly recovers from any mistake he makes. In fact, he’ll often recover so quickly from his mistakes that the mistake somehow makes him look better in the end; he turns a positive into a negative.

So, while credentials do help you to find the right attorney for you – Did I mention that I was named a Certified Elder Law Attorney? – credentials are not the be-all and end-all. Take your lawyer for a spin.