Honest Lawyers - a oxymoron?

I know most people will say that there's nothing like an honest lawyer. I think so too but in my case, I say that from personal experience something that most people probably wont have.

I was trying to find a lawyer experienced in corporate law to go through an agreement I wanted reviewed and perhaps reviesed till it was appropriate for me. Thinking I'd go to the best, I called up a very large locally based law firm that I will not name but will referr to as BL. At the firm I called their most experienced lawyer with supposed expertise in my area of interest (the firm has a complete searchable directory and contact info on their website) and explained what I wanted. I said I had the text of an agreement that has most of what I want and I wanted a lawyer to go through it and revise it so it suited my purposes.

This guy said he could work with me and said that initially he would give it a "quick look" and tell me if it needed revision or not - that's it a quick look to tell me if it needed work but would not do any revision - and for that he would charge me $500! $500 for a quick look.

I kept my cool and asked him politely exactly what he meant by a "quick look". I mean I already knew it needed work right? Why would I pay him $500 for him to tell me the same thing. The bastard realized he'd been exposed and began blabbering about how they were a huge law firm and how his hourly rate was $450 and how they worked with big firms and yet he was willing to work with me and crap like that. That's funny - his hourly rate is $450, i.e. I should be getting an hour of his time for just $450 but instead for me he was willing to charge $500 for what would be less than 5 minutes of his time. Come to think of it, he wouldn't have to spend any time at all - One could **always** say of any document - "it needs work". Easy and simple and impossible to disprove. After all he didn't even have to tell me what work it needed! Such a quick and easy way to make $500 from a sucker!

I politely listened to him try to recover from my exposure of his dishonesty when he said that for a small firm like mine an independent lawyer would be better and that he could give me a reference if I wanted. I said fine and then he said that his assistant would call me after which we rang off. And guess what - his assistant never did call back.

I ended up going with an independent lawyer in another state who claims on his website to provide real value etc. etc. After I spoke to him and he agreed to work with my draft agreements (which BTW came from a well regarded book - I didn't just pull them out of my rear end). I've sent him the agreements and answered some questions of his. I spoke to him after he missed one self imposed deadline and he said that he'd suddenly got busy etc. with another project and he'd have my stuff ready by Monday (today). He's not gotten back to me yet. More on this later.