Sitting down with a defense lawyer? Ten minutes that tell you who actually shows up

A consultation on an impaired driving charge in Washington is usually free, usually thirty to forty-five minutes, and usually spent by the lawyer explaining the charge to you. That is backwards for your purposes. You already know what you are charged with, because it is printed on the citation and repeated in the arraignment paperwork, and what you do not know is which human being will stand next to you in a district or municipal courtroom nine months from now. The consultation is the only moment when asking that costs you nothing.

Weekly volume, and why it changes the price of everything else

Ask how many impaired driving files the office is carrying right now, and how many of those are in the specific court where your case sits. An office handling these weekly has already litigated the breath test foundation in front of your judge, already knows which prosecutor in that jurisdiction will discuss an amendment before the readiness hearing and which one will not, and already has a template motion that needs facts inserted rather than research from scratch. A general practice taking the file on has to buy that knowledge with hours, and those hours are either billed to you or absorbed at the cost of thoroughness.

The second-order effect is what matters. Volume does not just make a lawyer faster; it changes what gets challenged. Someone who reads a hundred toxicology packets a year notices the thermometer calibration date that is three weeks stale. Someone reading their fourth packet reads it correctly and still does not know what unusual looks like. That difference does not show up in the fee agreement, and it does not show up until the suppression motion is either filed or quietly not filed.

Who appears at arraignment, at pretrial, at the motion hearing

Ask by name. In many offices the lawyer you meet handles the substantive hearings and an associate or contract attorney covers routine continuances, which is normal, efficient, and worth knowing in advance rather than discovering from the gallery. What a careful reader checks is whether the coverage arrangement is written into the fee agreement or merely described in conversation. Ask specifically who argues a CrRLJ 3.6 suppression motion, who conducts the readiness hearing where most negotiation actually happens, and whether the same attorney handles the separate Department of Licensing administrative matter or whether that is a different person, a different fee, or not included at all.

The licensing side is where general practices most often leave a gap. The administrative hearing runs on its own deadline, independent of the criminal case, and missing it costs you a suspension that the criminal outcome will not undo. An office doing this work weekly treats that deadline as a calendar item rather than a discovery.

How these files actually end

Ask what share of the office's impaired driving cases resolve without a trial, and then ask what those resolutions looked like: amendments to reckless or negligent driving, deferred prosecution for clients with a treatment finding, dismissals after a successful suppression motion, or pleas as charged with negotiated sentencing terms. The percentage alone tells you little. The distribution tells you a great deal, because an office that resolves ninety percent of files short of trial and got there through litigated motions is doing different work than an office that reaches the same number by pleading early.

You should also ask when the office last tried one of these to verdict. Prosecutors track that. A lawyer who never tries cases negotiates against a discount that everyone in the room understands, and the client pays for it in the terms of the resolution rather than in the invoice.

The technical questions that reveal preparation

Standardized field sobriety testing is administered under protocols developed and maintained by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which is responsible for that training framework nationally. Ask whether anyone in the office has taken the practitioner course, and whether they have reviewed your bodycam footage against it. Ask whether the office retains an independent toxicologist and how that expense is handled, since expert fees are frequently outside a flat fee and can arrive as a separate four-figure item. A practice doing this weekly answers all three without pausing, because those questions arrive in every consultation and the answers are already settled.

Write the questions down before you go. Bring the citation, the arrest report if you have it, and the licensing notice, and spend the meeting on the mechanics of representation rather than the mechanics of the charge. The office that welcomes those questions is the one that has already answered them internally.