Client's right in state of New Jersey for lawyer who is non responsive

Lack of communication from attorney: My husband and I are in the process of adopting our 3-year-old grandson. We hired an attorney on April 8th of this year and paid his fee in advance as he required. We have received one letter from him since that time, dated May 17th, stating that he filed the complaint for adoption on April 25th. We have tried to reach him many times and have yet to receive a response. I contacted the Surrogate's Office to find out if the complaint had actually been filed and was informed that it was received in April but had to be sent back to the attorney due to some needed corrections. It was returned to him in May. He has yet to return the complaint. Furthermore, we never received a copy of the complaint from the attorney. I have written a letter to the attorney stating that we are concerned that this process is taking so long and that we have not received any response from him after attempting to contact him numerous times. The letter also states that if we do not hear from him within 14 days of the date of the letter, we will contact the Ethics Committee and the Fee Arbitration Committee. I have hesitated to take this action but see no other alternative. The woman to whom I spoke at the Surrogate's Office said that she has never had to deal with this type of issue in the past and recommended that I contact someone to report the attorney's behavior. We cannot afford to hire another attorney to fix this and we honestly don't know what else we can do. Any advice would be greatly appreciated. - Is this your question? Add additional information