A first consultation is usually somewhere between thirty minutes and ninety, sometimes free and sometimes billed at the full hourly rate, and in either case it is the only part of the relationship you get to evaluate before you commit money to it. Most people spend the time telling their story, which is understandable and largely wasted, because the story will be told again in an intake questionnaire. The useful version of that hour runs the other direction. You ask, the lawyer answers, and you listen less for the content of the answer than for whether the answer has edges on it.
Who does the work, and what each hour costs
Start with the four that decide the bill. Who handles the file day to day, the attorney across the table or an associate you have not met? What is the rate for each person who might touch it, including the paralegal who drafts discovery? How large is the initial retainer, is it a deposit against hourly work or a flat fee, and what triggers a request to replenish it? And in what increments is time billed, six minutes or fifteen, because a firm that bills a quarter hour for a two-line email is quietly charging you several times over for a short exchange.
The answers to those four either come quickly or they do not. A lawyer who quotes a rate schedule from memory, names the associate, and tells you plainly that the retainer will likely be exhausted in the first sixty days of a contested case is describing a system they run every week. A lawyer who says the retainer usually covers it, without saying covers what, has told you nothing you can hold them to later. Ask for the fee agreement to read at home rather than at the table.
The money that is not the fee
Question five is the one people forget: what will this case cost beyond your time? Filing fees, service of process, deposition transcripts, a custody evaluator or guardian ad litem, a real estate appraiser, a forensic accountant for a closely held business or a pension valuation. These are advanced costs, billed through and often payable up front, and in a contested custody or complex property case they can rival the legal fees themselves. Question six is which of them your county actually orders in practice, as opposed to which are theoretically available.
Seven is tax treatment, and here you want a lawyer who knows the limit of their own lane. Support and property transfers have federal consequences that the IRS is responsible for administering, and the rules changed for agreements after 2018 in ways that make older advice actively wrong. What you want to hear is not a confident recitation but a clear statement of what they handle, what your accountant should handle, and at what point in drafting the two conversations need to meet.
The path, and the alternatives to it
Eight: if I mediated this instead of filing, what would you do differently, and what would it likely cost? Nine: what is the realistic range of outcomes here, worst to best, given this county and the judges who sit in it? Ten: what are the two or three things most likely to make this case expensive? A lawyer who answers eight with a flat dismissal of mediation, or nine with a prediction rather than a range, is selling certainty that no one in family court possesses. The better answer describes a range, names the variables, and tells you which of them you control.
Set the two paths beside each other while you have someone qualified in the room. Litigation buys you a decision when the other side will not move, at a cost measured in months and in fees that scale with conflict. Mediation and collaborative practice buy speed and privacy, and require a counterparty who will disclose honestly. Ask which one they think fits your facts and, more revealing, ask what would make them change that recommendation in three months.
Communication, and how it ends
Eleven: how do you communicate, who answers when you are in trial, and what is a normal response time for a non-emergency email? Twelve: how does this engagement end, and what happens to my file? Withdrawal for nonpayment, transfer of the file to a new attorney, whether copies cost you anything. Nobody enjoys asking the last one, and the willingness to answer it evenly is among the better signals available in a first meeting.
Take notes in the room, not afterward. Then read them a day later, and mark every answer you could not repeat to a friend in one sentence. Those are the follow-up calls.