About Doogue + George

By putting yourself in the hands of accredited criminal law specialists your increase your chances of getting the best result possible. The problems and issues that criminal lawyers face are often extremely complex and we are trained and experienced in dealing with those issues. Our firm are committed to ongoing training of our staff in the area of criminal law. We often organise experts to come and provide in-house training and our solicitors all attend external training. Criminal Law is different to commercial law and the strategic decisions you make need to be based on experience (not guesswork). You need a firm of criminal lawyers acting for you that has constant experience in the area to get you the best outcome. We can tell you how how a jury will react to a defended case or when a Prosecutor might be ready to accept a plea offer. We will assess your case and give you honest and pragmatic advice. Our general advice to people looking for a lawyer is following;

• Make sure the person is in a firm of accredited specialists.

  
  They should have the LIV specialisation logo on display on their website or business card. The Law Institutes has an accreditation process that involves examinations and performance review. That is the most basic starting point.

• Ensure that the person involved is well known in criminal law and that they have been involved in many jury trials.
  Ask them how many trials their firm have run and when they last ran one. You will be surprised to find that some firms never run criminal jury trials. Or do so very rarely. The firm should be running at least one jury trial a month.
• Go and talk to them about what they would do for you.
  If your matter is serious most would be willing to talk to you initially to give you some idea of their approach. Contact criminal lawyers in Melbourne and assess whose approach appeals to you most.
• Discuss costs at the first meeting.
  Some matters can just come down to which lawyer gives you the best price.
• Take a list of questions to ask the lawyer.
  Often when you first meet them you may forget to ask things that are actually very important to you. Use this list as a starting point of questions.
• You have to feel comfortable with your lawyer.
  Their role is very important and if you do not feel they are up to the job then go and see someone else. A lawyer who is comfortable with their skills will not try to hard sell you their services.
• Do not believe someone just writing on a website that they are an expert lawyer.
  Nor believe someone saying that they are widely accepted as being a specialist. Search their cases on the Law Case website AustLII, where you can read reported Court cases. Seeing actual examples of how often the firm you are talking to has appeared in higher courts is instructive and may indicate that they have a busy jury practice if they are appearing regularly in the appeal Courts.

Below are just a couple of search links. Enter “Doogue” into the search terms to find some of our cases.

• Search Court of Appeal
• Search Supreme Court

If a firm has not appeared much in the Higher Courts they may still be good lawyers. It just means you need to ask them different questions. There are a number of lawyers and criminal firms who hold themselves out as expert Melbourne criminal lawyers who clearly are not. Put their name in and search the databases for the work that they have done. Keep asking questions of your lawyers until you are satisfied that you have the answers you want.