Sydney Criminal Lawyers® – the criminal lawyers others follow

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Sydney Criminal Lawyers team photo

Sydney Criminal Lawyers® commenced practice in 2001.

Since that time, we have introduced a range of innovations to make our firm more transparent, accessible and accountable than other criminal law firms.

Perhaps the most significant (and controversial) of those was the publication in 2004 of fixed fees for a range of criminal and traffic law services, such as ‘guilty pleas in the local court’, defended hearings for assault and drug cases, bail applications, prison visits, police interviews, appeals etc.

We were the first firm to publish fixed fees for criminal & traffic law services, and we certainly copped a lot of flack from other criminal defence lawyers at the time, who saw us as somehow undermining the credibility of the profession by letting clients (and everyone else) know how much we were charging.

Those lawyers seemed to believe that fees should not be fixed, let alone published on a website.

Without sounding conceited, we truly believed that clients had (and have) a right to know how much their cases would cost from the start.

We saw that many (if not most) complaints about the criminal law profession came from overcharging or miscommunication of costs – and what better way to overcome that problem than to publish fixed fees!

Since that time, many many other law firms have copied that innovation.

In fact, in just one year (2012) at least four law firms ‘cut and pasted’ our fixed fees page directly onto their own websites! Of course, they ultimately had to ‘re-jig’ and republish their website pages using their own content.

More recently, we published our criminal and traffic case results, again controversially.

We were regularly criticised for this move, but we still can’t understand why.

Why should we be unable to publish case results?

We were asked by one person to publish more detail about the cases.

Did they not believe our results?

We obliged and gave more detail, whilst maintaining client confidentiality.

Sydney Criminal Lawyers® is and always will be a results-based firm that is proud of our track record in criminal and traffic law cases. And we see no reason to hide our results.

Of course, several firms have now copied our innovation, publishing their own results.

Other innovations include published testimonials, our Specialist Lawyer Guarantee and regular blogs and videos sharing our legal information with the public.

Anyone can comment on our blogs – whether favourable, unfavourable or if we get something wrong!

The legal profession has long been seen as conceited, unaccountable, arrogant and greedy.

It doesn’t have to be that way.

Information about the law and legal costs should be freely available to everyone – which is why our website sydneycriminallawyers.com.au contains over 2,000 pages of legal information.

We will continue to be a profession leading, results based practice well into the future.

Stay tuned, big things are happening in late 2013.

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Author

Ugur Nedim

Ugur Nedim

Ugur Nedim is an Accredited Criminal Law Specialist with 25 years of experience as a Criminal Defence Lawyer. He is the Principal of Sydney Criminal Lawyers®.

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