Bar standing, who actually appears at settings, how messages get answered between dates, and the fee agreement language that decides what your money bought.
The fee agreement is usually two pages, and the meeting that produces it usually runs under an hour. That asymmetry is the whole problem. A felony case in a Texas district court can stretch across a year and a dozen settings, and almost everything that will frustrate you later is decided in those two pages or in an answer you did not press on. The questions below are the ones a careful reader asks before money changes hands, when the answers still cost nothing and the leverage still belongs to the person writing the check.
Confirm the license before you confirm anything else
The State Bar of Texas publishes a searchable directory of licensed attorneys, and the entry shows eligibility to practice, the year of admission, the county of the listed office, and any public disciplinary history. This takes about four minutes and it is worth doing before the first meeting rather than after, because it changes what you listen for. An attorney admitted three years ago is not disqualified from handling a first-degree felony, but the answer to how many jury trials they have carried to verdict should match what the directory implies. Public reprimands are rare enough that finding one deserves a direct question, asked plainly.
Ask who physically stands beside you at the docket call
Most criminal defense practices in North Texas run more than one courtroom on a given morning, which means the person who signs your agreement is not always the person at counsel table when your case is called. That is not automatically bad. Coverage counsel handle routine resets competently, and a reset is a reset. The second-order effect is what matters: continuity. If a different associate appears at four consecutive settings, none of them carries the full history of the plea negotiation, and the prosecutor's memory becomes the only continuous record of the conversation. Ask who appears, ask what happens if that person is unavailable, and ask whether the answer changes for a contested hearing.
Pin down what happens in the eight weeks between dates
Felony settings in Dallas, Tarrant, Collin, and Denton counties are often six to ten weeks apart, and the silence in between is where most clients lose confidence. Ask concretely: who answers the phone, whether the attorney reads email directly or through staff, how long a return call typically takes, and whether discovery gets shared with you or only summarized. Ask whether the office sends written confirmation of each setting date, because a missed court date on a felony bond produces a capias and a bond forfeiture, and the cost of that clerical failure lands entirely on you. A practice with a real system will describe it without hesitating.
Read the agreement for what it does not cover
A flat fee is a scope of work, not a promise of an outcome, and the scope is defined by the exclusions. Look for language separating pretrial representation from trial, because many agreements quote one number through plea negotiation and a second, larger number if the case is set for a jury. Look for who pays an investigator, a lab expert, or a court reporter's record. Look for whether appeal and motions for new trial are excluded, since they almost always are. If a payment plan runs through a third-party financing company rather than the firm, that is consumer credit, an area the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau oversees, and the interest terms deserve the same reading as the fee terms.
The answers that end the meeting
Some responses are simply disqualifying, and recognizing them early saves a retainer that is hard to claw back. Any prediction of a specific result, any suggestion that a relationship with a particular judge or prosecutor will change the outcome, and any reluctance to put the fee in writing all belong in that category. So does vagueness about who appears, or a refusal to say whether the quoted fee includes trial. A lawyer who says the case will take as long as it takes, who explains the range of outcomes without promising one, and who hands over a written agreement that matches what was said out loud has already told you something useful about how the next year will go.
Bring the agreement home. Read it once at the kitchen table, mark the sentence you do not understand, and call back with that one question before you sign. The answer, and the willingness to give it, is the last piece of information you get for free.