Transcript of the above video:

As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing free consultations. I hesitated to make this video but it seems like once every year, 18 months, I end up having to do one of these videos because I end up with a lot of really irate mail, email from folks regarding free consults. Let me be clear, as I said in another video, there have been times when I have thought about just making the announcements "hey we are no longer doing free consults; that is not how it is going to be done". But, I don't really want to do that because I feel like frankly we can help folks and I think it discourages people to seek assistance, especially at the outset, if there is not a free consultation involved. 

That said, people's definition of a "free consultation" is wildly different than ours here in our firm which is basically look, the free consultation is you contact us, we kind of prefer it by email, you contact us and we tell you "hey look we can assist with this”. Now, the details on the who, what, where, when, why and precisely how everything is going to work, even pricing, are issues which we are really going to need to deal with when we are dealing with rendering opinions on how best to perceive; when we are talking about dealing with especially long term legal issues, these are things that we are going to have to deal with on a much more detailed basis. A free consultation is not this protracted sort of ongoing "we are going to tell you everything, how to do it, everything about it, a complete dissertation on everything associated with that particular aspect of whatever jurisprudence you are dealing with", that's not what it is. Fundamentally what a free consultation is to us is look, contact us, we will tell you if we can assist you, we will give you information on the terms of that assistance or we will tell you we can't assist you. We send out emails weekly, daily sometimes to people and we simply say look due to the case load we can't handle that or due to the fact that it really isn't something we work on, we can't assist with that. European Visas are a really good example with respect to things we just don't do here in our office and we do get a fair number of inquiries on that and we simply say "look we can't assist with that".

So while I don't want this to come off as a particularly negative video I have thought in the past about no longer advertising free consultation but look at the end of the day that is what it is. The free consultation is: you contact us, we tell you how we can assist, we give you the terms of that assistance and then if you want to proceed we will go from there.