Most people hire a criminal lawyer once in their life, usually in a hurry, and usually while frightened. There is no obvious way to compare one lawyer to another, and the marketing all sounds the same. In the film above, Robb sets out the four things he would look at himself. They are worth understanding before you sign a retainer with anyone.
1. Where they went to law school
Ask whether the lawyer attended law school in Canada or the United States. It is not snobbery. Completing a Canadian or American law degree and then qualifying to practise in Ontario represents a specific and verifiable level of academic achievement, and it is the baseline requirement to be a practising lawyer in Toronto at all. It tells you nothing about courtroom skill on its own, but it is the first filter, and it is easy to check.
2. Whether they actually practise criminal law
Hire someone who specializes in criminal law, or at minimum works primarily in it. A great deal of the profession practises broadly, taking criminal files alongside family, civil, or immigration work. Criminal law is its own discipline with its own procedure, its own evidentiary rules, and its own Charter jurisprudence. A lawyer who lives in that world every day is reading the same cases as the Crown across from them.
3. Whether they have run jury trials
This is the question most people never think to ask, and it is the one that separates the field fastest. Jury trials are the most serious trials in the system, and they demand a specific set of skills: opening and closing to twelve lay people, managing a witness in front of them, and handling a judge's charge. As Robb puts it, there are many excellent criminal lawyers in Toronto who have never run a single jury trial. That does not make them bad lawyers. It does make them the wrong lawyer for a case that is going to a jury.
4. Whether they have won murder trials
Fewer still have run a murder trial, and fewer again have won them consistently. If you are facing the most serious charge in the Criminal Code, you want someone who has stood in that exact position before and knows what the year ahead looks like. Between December 2024 and December 2025, Robb and his team took five separate clients from a murder charge to walking free, through full acquittals and charges dropped outright.
Ask the questions out loud
None of these are rude questions. Any lawyer worth retaining will answer them directly and without irritation, and the answers are usually verifiable. A lawyer who deflects on jury trial experience is telling you something useful.
For Robb, the answers are the reason he does the work at all: helping people out of the worst moment of their lives, and watching them go on to do great things once his office has helped them out of their criminal hot water.