Jacqueline Winter Silbermann

I went through a heartbreaking two years with the firm at Blank Rome. I was represented by Judge Silbermann and then by Richard Adago. I went to this firm because Silbermann had been a judge in marital court and a mediator. It seemed like she had all the credential and experience i was looking for.... And, I paid a tremendous amount of money for her expertise and services. I did not want to be adversarial with my x, so I thought someone who had been a mediator would best serve my needs. It was a sacrifice for me to pay her hourly fees, but I thought there was a correlation between whopping hourly fees and expertise. I also did not realize that being a Judge did not necessarily lend itself to litigation and that was a completely different skill. I also did not realize that all those years on a bench made for interesting relationships with other attorneys for example my ex husbands. I was a novice at this. I never did get a stipulation that provided me while I was going through the process of divorce with a monthly amount of money, always having to beg for money. Oddly, she sent me back to my x to negotiate my own divorce, each time getting deeper into trouble, because he kept taking my information and manipulating it with his own attorneys. But she kept telling me to go back to him to negotiate. Things kept getting worse and worse. Finally an "agreement" was reached, not an agreement i agreed to, and Adago and Silbermann told me that I was "lucky i was getting what I was being offered, and if i didn't sign it would only get worse". It told them that I needed to see proof of the pre marital asset claim, and they never showed me this. Why? Because it did not exist. They were relying on my x's paperwork and his attorneys proof, never doing due diligence in my behalf. I kept telling them that the information they were getting was not actually the statements from the financial institutions but they were spread sheets that he had created himself. They never believed me. One day the stars looked down upon me completely coincidentally meeting a woman who had used Silbermann (how lucky it had come up randomly in conversation) and told me that all the chaos and extended time to accomplish this divorce was not my fault that this had happened exactly to her. From this conversation i gathered all my courage to move to another attorney. It was terrifying to do, but I knew instinctively that something was really wrong. And my life changed! My new attorney could not believe what she was seeing. We deposed my x and found all the misrepresentations. And, ultimately I was divorced within that year! The settlement was exactly fair and the experience was 180 degrees different from the previous two years. I learned a lot, and if I can give any advise to any one reading this it is this: divorce is painful enough, with good representation it can be made easier; go with your instinct: if you think your attorney isn't doing the right thing, they probably aren't; and don't be afraid of your attorney...I got so lucky in the end, If I had stayed with Silbermann and Blank Rome it would have been a very different story for me...and I would be angry about all of this. I do wish I could recoup the tens of thousands I spent on the worst kind of representation, but I cannot, there is a deep wall around firms protecting their money, but you know I chalk it off to a good education. No attorney is smarter than truth, and at the end of the day the truth with good representation can prevail. It did in my case, it can in yours. Beware this large firm. Make sure your attorney not only says they have your best interests at heart, make sure they work for you, listen to you, and advocate for you. Unfortunately Judge Silbermann did not know how to do this.