a public defender's secret

My practice is 99% juvenile criminal defense; I contract out as a public defender. The other day some parent went out and hired a big name defense lawyer for a kid whose case I was working on. It happens, no big deal.

I hand the file to this guy and tell him  "the prosecutor figures the standard sentence is ****, but I think the 150% rule applies."

"Uh... what's the 150% rule?"

I won't get into the arcana of calculating a juvenile sentence under Washington State law; let's just say that you should know what the 150% rule is if you're going to hold yourself out as competent to do it. 

Here's the dirty little secret:
As a public defender, I often find myself coaching the private attorneys behind the scenes on how to do the actual work. Some are good- better than I am, honestly- and some are the idiots of the Bar Association village. None of them spend the kind of time doing juvenile law that I do.

The myth is that PDs are overworked and incompetent and you need a private attorney to get a good result. In some areas, that may be true. Hell, I often feel overworked. My colleagues and I, though, are the most competent juvenile lawyers in town. If you go out and hire a private attorney, what it gets you is more personal attention, a lawyer with a fancy office, and maybe less time waiting 
for your case to be called, not a better defense. 
If another lawyer has one case on the docket and I have ten, 
it's common courtesy to let him go first. 
Kind of like the express lane at Safeway. Whose house do you want to go to
 dinner at, though? The 
yuppie with  five Lean Cuisines, or the guy with the cart load of 
real vegetables, fresh beef, and raw fruit?