A consultation is a short window, often thirty or sixty minutes, in which two things happen at once: the lawyer evaluates the case, and you evaluate the lawyer. Most people spend the whole hour on the first. The second is where the money is decided, because the difference between an attorney who treats a custody modification as a discrete problem and one who treats it as this week's fourteenth intake shows up in the answers long before it shows up in the bill. The questions below are ordinary. The gap between the two kinds of answer is not.
Discipline history, and the difference between clean and blank
Every state bar publishes a licensing record, usually searchable by name, showing admission date, standing, and any public discipline. Check it before the meeting, not after. A record with no public discipline is common and tells you little on its own; what matters more is admission year, whether the license has lapsed or been administratively suspended for dues or continuing education, and whether the attorney is admitted in the state where your case will actually be heard. If something does appear, the useful move is to ask about it directly. An attorney who explains a fee dispute from 2014 in two sentences has told you more than a blank page ever will.
How much of the practice is actually family law
Ask what share of the current caseload is domestic relations, and then ask what the rest is. One attorney says roughly ninety percent family, with the remainder guardianships and the occasional estate matter for a longtime client. Another says the firm handles family, criminal defense, personal injury, and bankruptcy, and that everyone pitches in. Neither answer is disqualifying by itself, but they describe different businesses. The Bureau of Labor Statistics tracks employment across legal occupations, and general practice remains ordinary in smaller markets. What you want to know is whether the person across the table reads your county's local rules every year or looks them up when something goes wrong.
Who stands up when the case is called
This is the question that most often produces a vague answer, and vagueness here is expensive. The senior attorney who conducted the consultation may not be the person at the temporary orders hearing. There is nothing wrong with an associate handling a status conference, provided you know it in advance and the rate reflects it. The answer you want names a person, describes which appearances they cover, and explains what happens if two hearings collide. The answer that should slow you down is that the firm will assign someone closer to the date. Ask to meet whoever that is, and ask what the handoff looks like in writing.
Local judges, local habits
Judicial familiarity is not about influence. It is about knowing that one judge wants financial affidavits filed a week early, that another rules from the bench on temporary support and will not read a brief longer than ten pages, and that a third refers nearly every contested custody matter to a parenting evaluator. An attorney who appears in your courthouse weekly can tell you which of those is likely and what it means for cost and schedule. An attorney who has not been in that division recently will speak in generalities about how these cases usually go. Compare the two answers side by side and the difference is unmistakable.
The questions that reveal volume work
Ask how many active family cases the attorney is carrying right now, and watch whether the number comes readily. Ask who returns calls and within what period, then ask what happened the last time a client called on a Friday afternoon. Ask what would make this case settle, and what would make it go to trial. A firm running on volume answers in scripts: every case settles, everything takes six to nine months, the retainer covers it. A firm that will do the work answers conditionally, names the two or three facts that will drive the outcome, and admits where it cannot predict. That admission is the reassuring answer, not the weak one.
Write the five questions down and ask them in the same order at each consultation. Comparing answers across two or three meetings is far more informative than judging any single one, because the pattern shows you what a careful practitioner sounds like in your market, and which office is already treating your case as a specific problem with a name on it.