Galveston Criminal Attorney Discusses His Criminal Defense Law Practice

Galveston Criminal Attorney Discusses His Criminal Defense Law Practice

Mark Diaz and Associates

I don’t have a typical topic today like I often do. Usually, I’ll take a question from someone and try to answer it in the context of criminal law. Today, I want to do something a little bit different. Which is to talk about our office, what it is that we do, and who I have working with me here. 

This was brought on by someone asking me the question, well, why should I hire you? And that’s a legitimate question. I’ve always said, I think that when you’re going to hire an attorney, you should go sit down with that attorney, talk to them one on one, and see if it seems like a good fit. So I just want to talk a little bit about our operation and how we do things here. Mark Diaz and Associates. 

First of all, I have said this before, and it’s important to me, not all attorneys who practice criminal defense have an office. There are plenty of what I call trunk lawyers, which means their office is in the trunk of their car. It’s not to say any of them are bad lawyers or good lawyers. It’s just what it is. I don’t think that would work for me, I want to be able to sit down in an office and go over evidence, view videos, etc… which kind of brought on another thing. 

Recently, someone was in here, talking to me about their case, and looking to potentially hire me for their case. They had recently had a different case and had a good lawyer. I was asking some questions about the previous case, specifically about what should have been some video evidence in that case, and they said, well, we never got to see the video. I was confused. What do you mean, you didn’t get to see the video? 

They said, well, he doesn’t have an office here, and we were never able to go to Houston, to see the video evidence. That just kind of bothered me, I guess you could say, because, as an accused, you want to be able to see the evidence against you. You should want to go over the evidence and evaluate the case with your lawyer to determine what the best course of action will be. 

So, yes, I have an office. My building is just across the street from the courthouse here in Galveston. Here we have Karina, who’s our receptionist, and we have two other lawyers here. We have Jessica Ebbs, and Thomas Overhouse, working alongside me. I have my office manager Shaylee, and then we have a new position that we’ve created. That is Melissa. 

Melissa has two basic functions. One is that she reviews the evidence for us to give us reports that tell us what we need to pay attention to and what we don’t. Then the other thing that she does is the very thing I was just discussing, which is if you are a client and you need to view the evidence in your case, which sometimes can be a lot.  

We have cases where up to five or more officers are responding to a scene, and you come here, you’ll set an appointment and Melissa will go through all your evidence with you. Then of course, if you have questions, you can meet with one of us after you have looked over the evidence. 

We will be happy to discuss the case with you, and try to help you make the best decisions for you. We try to be as full service as possible. We have management software that allows you to log in and see information about your case, we can publish documents for you in there, you can upload documents to us. If you think that there’s something important that we need to consider in your case, you can text us through there, you can email us through our software, we try to make communication a priority. We’re here to try and answer any questions you have. 

Like I said, this gentleman was asking me, why you? Why should I hire you? All I can tell you is that we try to do the best we can for all of our clients. We’re always here. If I’m not in a trial, I’m here in the office, we have plenty of people that just walk in to see us, and of course, we’re happy to talk. My answer to him was that if you hire me, my entire team is going to do all we can for you. You will never have any questions about where we are, or what we’re doing. 

You can log in to our system and see it for yourself, or you can come here and ask questions, go through the evidence, anything you need to know about your case, we’re going to make it available to you. That’s a priority. I may look at a video and feel the need to give you my interpretation of how a jury is going to react. Some people look at a video of themselves and see what they want to see. Whereas I’ve been trying cases to juries for so long, I can look at it and tell you what the prosecution is going to point out, and what the jury’s perspective may be. 

If we are dealing with something like that, you and I need to sit down and discuss it so you can have a better understanding of the situation. Depending on what the evidence is, I might recommend that we go to trial, or we take a plea. But before you make the decision, you need to have all of the information. 

So that’s pretty much all I have for today. Just a quick recap of what we do here at the office. If anyone has any questions, like always, just email me during the week. Hope y’all have a good rest of your week.

-Mark Diaz