Claudine R Sattler

Attorney Sattler under-handedly turned what I intended to be a 15-minute exploration of her willingness to provide legal counsel without representing me (limited scope representation) into an hour-long interview, without informing me that she would later charge her hourly rate for it. She said she wo...uld not begin advising me until her retainer was paid and fee agreement signed. I paid her retainer. Her fee agreement was very one-sided; what client must do; no mention of what attorney would do in return. A final version was never accepted/signed by both her and me, but she began giving premature 'advice' anyway, including her ignorant-of-the-Albuquerque-court-system answer to my "What is my next step? question: "Wait to see what the judge does next." (This advice was incompetent because any lawyer should know, as I learned from following her misdirection, that a probate judge in Albuquerque initiates nothing. It is entirely up to the applicant to direct the proceedings and provide all forms, which is specifically what I had asked her help with: next steps and forms.) Following this incompetent advice lost me my time-sensitive chance to succeed in my application to the court to be appointed my deceased sister's Personal Representative. When I terminated our attorney-client arrangement 13 days after our initial phone contact and asked for a specified refund that accounted for all the charges to my account she had given me over the phone just five days before (during which interim no interactions had occurred), she sent me a final invoice that contained additional trumped up charges and a refund check 2/3 the amount I had calculated and requested. I returned the voided check to the co-signer V.P. of her bank as unacceptable and filed a complaint with the New Mexico Disciplinary Board, the NM Bar Association and the Client Protection Fund. To this day Attorney Sattler holds my entire retainer fee, refusing to return any portion of it. Neither have I received an apology of any sort for her incompetence or the consequences I suffered for following her advice.