Ryan E Cooke

A fantastic attorney, has been flexible, communicative and invested in my case and the wellbeing of my children. Easily accessible to his clients, always ensures I am well informed and included in all decisions going forward. Doesn’t sugar coat things or provide false hope. Makes a plan going forward... and follows through quickly. Divorce and custody battles are hard enough. Ryan provides results and peace of mine that are more than worth his retainer. His legal assistant is also very friendly and approachable.

He told me that i was not entittled to my husband 401k and that we can estimate how much he gets without figure from my X 401k got upset and said i should get another attorney prove to me he was very rude was on the side of my X husbands attorney because they were high power attorneys, he took every...thing i said as a joke and nothing he said never worked out as he said i had to seek another attorney and fire him

When first looking for an attorney in Albany within my limited financial means, a colleague and "friend" of Mr. Cooke's told me that I would be better off going with a public defender. This turned out to be true, but I had been advised by friends and family that even potentially sub-par representatio...n would be better than none, so I hired Ryan. Ryan constantly spoke at length about his connections with other lawyers and city officials that turned out to be completely untrue or gross, egregious exaggerations. Apparently he thought I would never fact-check his nonsense, even though it was pretty transparent that he was all bravado. It was next to impossible to keep him on a relevant subject; he would provide unsolicited hypothetical scenarios that were totally unhelpful (e.g. “If your case was being processed in x county” or “Now, if this incident had occurred in [some other city], blablaba”). It was infuriating and seemed like a feeble attempt to appear more knowledgeable than he actually was. If you ask him a straightforward question, he will somehow find a way to answer every question BUT the one you actually asked. Perhaps he's accustomed to dealing with uneducated people who don't recognize a smokescreen. This is where it went from simply annoying to a clear indication of disorganization and professional neglect. Just one example: he straight up lied several times about having “extensive” experience with a woman in charge of an influential institution in Troy, even providing gratuitous details about their professional and personal relationship. I found this to be a very concerning lie when I spoke with her and she stated that she had only worked with him ONE other time and it was abundantly clear that she barely knew him. Why lie about something like that? He led me to believe that certain outcomes for my case were entirely possible - even probable - and then would completely flip and act like he had never said those things. In short, he delivered on literally nothing he set out to do in my case. There is a big difference between being cautiously optimistic and setting unrealistic expectations for your client. If it had just been a few times that his words weren’t truthful, I would have chalked it up to his attempt to inspire hope in me; it was, however, purely irresponsible and misleading. I don’t think he was attempting to be deliberately unethical or malicious, but in terms of hiring effective legal counsel, this man was anything but.