Sharyn T Sooho

This was a horrific divorce and custody case that occurred a few years ago, where I am only now able to write about the compounded damage imposed upon me by this attorney. Attorney Sooho had billed herself as experienced in successfully handing difficult custody cases, and tackling the issues of hidd...en assets and inflates expenses. My then husband had hired a mercenary who had built up levels of animosity with my former attorney to where he threatened OC in the court house after the temporary hearing. Even though he had done a thorough job of discovery, I feared he had lost objectivity and would be ineffective in presenting my case. I hired Attorney Sooho providing her with subpoenaed records from my ex's work (a medical professional with a high 6-figure annual income), his deposition where he had arrogantly stated that he intended to eliminate me from my daughters' lives, that he abused me and that he gambled much of the family's income at the casinos and through the lottery, interrogatories full of provable false statements, and bank statements and credit card statements showing that he was spending money lavishly - while I basically financed most of the family's expenses. Attorney Sohoo used none of these documents to build my case. Instead she hired "assistants" with no legal training to type up motions from templates, did not get my re-writes on the motions into court on time to be submitted, had her assistants respond to my emails, took a week off to collaborate on redesigning her website during the most crucial phase of the process - the pretrial, and was abysmally unprepared to present my position when appearing. She did not report to the Judge that my ex had decided not to show for a family therapy meeting, or that he had altered the grades on my daughter's report card when submitting it as evidence, she never reported the correlation between returning my daughter late Sunday nights with no homework done and her falling grades, she did not mention that my ex and his extended family subjected all three of my daughters to a continuous loop of disdainful and disparaging diatribes about me during his family's big Sunday dinners at his parents' house. Instead, she remained mute while his attorney slandered me at hearings, while extolling the fictional virtues of my ex - who up until the time he filed for divorce had never had a hand in raising the girls. After hearing only the false and twisted case presented by the opposition, the judge ruled that alimony for me would be terminated (I had only just been hired a month after seeking work for over a year), that my ex would retain sole custody of my daughter (my two older daughters were emancipated), and that I would pay him $328 weekly in child support. Since the divorce, my daughters have not spent one major holiday with me because they fear being ostracized from their father and his family (we had lived In his parents' property surrounded by his sibs, their spouses and kids for 25 years while I raised them, so the girls became enmeshed in the culture). My girls and I had always been close prior to this debacle, I could never have imagined them becoming alienated from me. They have all been scarred emotionally; especially my youngest who now attends college but still lives with her father, I was diagnosed with PTSD, depression and panic attacks. Attorney Sooho knew what my ex had planned and did nothing to intervene even though she had all of the evidence ready made to prove his intent to the court. I did not ask her to be a mad dog litigator, like Opposing Counsel. All she was required to do was show the Judge the evidence that validated my ex's plan: which was as he told me early on "To leave you alone, with nothing -a nobody". She did not care about my case; just about getting paid. I wished I could had written this sooner to warn others, but her negligence left me incapacitated to the point where I was ultimately determined to be disabled by SSA.