Justin Chance Smith

Never had the chance to hire Chance Smith and after talking to him once, he's permanently removed from my contact list. I'm one of those lead-foot guys and have been since I turned 16, unfortunately. I've used attorneys ad nauseam over the years. It's an annual occurrence. I began using James Mallory... for Tarrant County tickets, moved over to Jim Lollar, who represented me for many years, and now use Justin Holt, who took over Lollar's book of business upon Lollar's retirement. Couldn't be happier with Holt and formerly Lollar. The reason I reached out to Chance is because I have a Dallas County ticket and my attorneys don't handle Dallas County business. Chance apparently does, or at least to some degree. I've planned to hire Chance for a couple of months but never have the ticket with me when I plan to call. Finally, when it dawned on me the other day that this ticket is still outstanding, I reached out to Chance even though I still did not have the ticket at hand. He essentially said he wouldn't help me unless I produced the ticket, incredulously claiming "there's too many courts in Dallas and I'm not going to research for free." Hmm, interesting approach employed dealing with a potential client. Had he been more diplomatic about his refusal, I'd likely still have hired him, but since the rationale was unprofessional and not something you say to a client or customer, whether true or not, his judgement is called into question. What makes this even more of a head scratcher is that I didn't call him to have him perform free research. I would have hired him on the spot, paid him via CC, and then allowed him to do his due diligence. Afterall, it is his profession, though he'd rather assign the difficult work to his clients. I don't expect anyone to do anything for free for me. I just wanted to hire the guy, but not only did he reveal his lack of judgement, but his logical reasoning was tremendously flawed too. Not a good combination for someone in his profession. If the job is easy, he'll do it. If the job isn't easy, he'll refuse it. What he failed to realize is that I'm a professional researcher. I own my own consulting firm. I often have to perform research for free in order to get an engagement executed and started. In fact, I'd spent about 3 hours the very morning I called Chance in doing due diligence (free research) for a proposal I was putting together. Just part of it... He tried to make amends when concluding the call, saying "but if you find the ticket, give us a call and we'll be glad to help." Uh, yea, right. Ok. I'll jump right on that.