Jon C. Cowen

As a trustee of a condo association, I worked with Jon (and his firm Donovan Hatem) on a memo to help settle a construction dispute between owners with an unbiased opinion on how trustees should read the docs. He took months to review a few condo and construction docs and presented a final version me...mo that was totally inaccurate and incomplete in my own attorney’s opinion as well as mine. Jon admitted there were major issues with the document in writing to the condo board. But after over $11k and 6 weeks to produce the first document, Jon wanted more money to fix what was incredibly sloppy work that should have not been delivered or at the very least been marked Draft 1. The board refused to pay him more money and the attorney refused to fix the issues for no fee so we got stuck with a useless and incomplete $11,000+ document. So his inaccuracies to the memo went knowingly uncorrected – he basically said to me when I complained (and I paraphrase), “Hey, my report is inaccurate and I know it, your board won’t pay me to fix it, tough luck.” Is this possible or ethical? I know when I make a mistake, I do not charge my clients to fix it. He was also very unresponsive and didn’t reply to most of my emails (and I didn’t send many). So I never knew if he was actually seeing the important information I was sending him and paying him to review. I asked him to reply to my emails and he had his IT folks set up a rude auto-reply that still didn’t tell me if he saw what I was sending him. This was super awful client service. Net net, I would NOT put anything important or complicated in Jon’s hands. In my opinion, he could not get his head around the issues or the documents to connect the dots.