Covers the sequence of a state criminal case from first appearance to disposition, what a written fee agreement includes and excludes, how indigency screening works, and what to ask before signing with a lawyer.
A man charged with a state jail felony in Tarrant County brought three things to his first consultation: the bond paperwork, a probable cause affidavit he had read four times, and a notice setting an announcement date five weeks out. He asked the lawyer what the case was worth. That was the wrong first question, and the answer he got, a range wide enough to cover probation through a year of confinement, told him almost nothing, because nobody had yet seen the offense report, the lab submission, or the two prior deferrals sitting in his criminal history.
1. Who physically appears at the settings
Ask it plainly, and ask it about the next three court dates rather than about the trial. Many defense practices, including good ones, send an associate or a covering attorney to routine announcement settings where nothing happens beyond a reset and a short conversation with the prosecutor. That is not a bug. It becomes a problem only when nobody can tell you who that person is, whether they will have read the file, or how what they hear at the docket gets back to the lawyer whose name is on the fee agreement. A useful answer names a person.
2. How often they work in this particular courthouse
County-level criminal practice is intensely local: the same judge, the same three or four prosecutors, the same coordinator who controls the setting calendar. A lawyer who appears in that court weekly knows whether the judge takes plea papers at nine or at eleven, whether the state's office runs an early disposition track, and which prosecutor actually has authority to move an offer. Ask how many cases they have handled in that specific court in the past year, not statewide. A rough number offered without hesitation is worth more than a confident round figure.
3. Trial record and plea record, asked separately
Most criminal cases in state trial courts resolve without a jury, and the Bureau of Justice Statistics is the federal body responsible for tracking how felony cases move through state courts. That means a lawyer with few trials is not necessarily a lawyer who avoids them. Ask two questions instead of one: how many jury trials to verdict in the last several years, and in what courts. Then ask how many cases they resolved by dismissal, reduction, or pretrial diversion. The second number describes the work your case will probably require. The first describes the leverage behind it.
4. What communication actually looks like between settings
The gap between an arraignment and a disposition is frequently months, and most of it is quiet. Ask who returns calls, how quickly, and by what method, then ask what happens when discovery arrives: does the office send you the offense report, summarize it, or set an appointment to review it. Ask whether you will be told about a plea offer in writing. A practice that has thought about this will describe a routine, including who covers when the lawyer is in trial, because trial weeks are precisely when clients go unanswered.
5. Sorting careful non-answers from evasive ones
Before anyone has read the file, refusing to predict an outcome is competence, not evasion, and a lawyer who guarantees dismissal at an initial meeting has told you something unflattering about their judgment. Vagueness about the merits is normal. Vagueness about structure is not. If the answers get soft on who appears, what the fee covers, whether investigator or expert costs are separate, and how a case gets reset, note it. A careful reader distinguishes uncertainty about facts nobody has yet from uncertainty about arrangements the office controls entirely.
The man in Tarrant County went back with a second list. He learned the covering attorney's name, that the office pulls discovery through the district attorney's portal within a week of appearance, that the fee covered everything through a contested pretrial hearing but not a jury trial, and that the lawyer had tried two cases in that building the previous spring. None of it predicted his outcome. All of it was checkable, and checking it took one phone call and about twenty minutes.