If you were in trouble with the law, who would have to help you?
It's a question Chris Miles asked himself after hearing about a friend's son whose car was stopped by police and searched.
"Who would I call? Almost invariably when I call a lawyer, I get their voicemail, or their secretary, I don’t necessarily have their cell numbers put into my phone, so who would I really be able to get?," Miles asked.
Miles decided to do something about it, creating a new company called Lawyer Up. Miles is a co-founder of the legal dispatch service that just launched in Connecticut.
The service is links clients to a network of attorneys, who specialize in legal emergencies. When users sign up for the service, they can pay a monthly subscription fee of $4.95 for an individual or $9.95 for families. They can also use a pay-as-needed option, which is a flat fee of $100. All plans charge $250 for the first hour of legal representation, and users are guaranteed legal advice within 15 minutes.
"What we do, is we allow our users, when they have a legal emergency, is to let every eligible attorney in our network know they have an emergency, and the first qualified lawyer who can take the case and comes back to our operators and says I want that case, is dispatched to the client," said Miles.
Lawyer Up is aimed at college students and their families, because Miles says statistics show that 16-to-24-year-olds have the highest rate of arrests, and many of them may not know what their options are in that type of situation.
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"I think it will help, especially young people, a lot of young people, who maybe don’t know what they’re doing and then they get themselves in trouble when they don’t really mean to," said Emily Uleano, a student at Southern Connecticut State University.
"Sometimes you might be in a situation where you’re not really sure what’s right or wrong and getting legal advice will definitely help, so you can figure out what to do, or maybe they can help you in some way," said Kerry Tattar, an SCSU student.
While many people think the service is useful, they don’t know how many people will actually pay a monthly fee for it, or go ahead and sign up for the service ahead of time.
"I think it depends on the situation. It depends on what kind of things they get into, if they’ve been in similar situations where they didn’t know what to do, if someone weren’t in that situation, I don’t think it would happen," said Tattar.
"I’m just not sure how much I would utilize it. I’ve never had any legal issues," said Mark Waters, a parent of a SCSU student.
Police say even if you do get in trouble with the law, they don't see how a speedy legal service like Lawyer Up will help move things along. An attorney doesn't help set bail or get a person out from behind bars.
"All of those decisions are certainly going to be made whether or not the person has an attorney with them," said Branford Police Captain Geoffrey Morgan.
In fact, in many cases, police say attorneys aren't needed right away. It's only when a person is in custody and being interrogated that they are read their rights and can ask for an attorney.
"They are at that point able to contact whichever they like to come down and have them with them during any type of custodial interrogation. Whether there’s somebody already on retainer, or they’re making a phone call out of a phone book is irrelevant to the police service," Morgan said.
Chris Miles says it's always better to be prepared.
"If that happens to you, then you need to be able to address it properly, and the answer is really simple. Everybody we talk to says, if you have a legal emergency, get a lawyer," said Miles.
And he says it's smart to have that lawyer be only a phone call away.
