Jacqueline Ricciani

This woman has a knack for defending the wrong people, and undermining or demonizing completely innocent people. Sometimes simultaneously. I have six siblings, but my youngest sister was the only child who gave our family any trouble. She frequently harrassed my parents; lied about her teachers, ...friends, family, and boyfriends; and in general could not even accept that she was at fault regardless of the situations she put herself in. We're talking false accusions of sexual misconduct by people at church and a photographer hired by her school, to refusing to clean her bedroom until mold grew in bowls and along the side of her bed. She finally ran away from home after she was encouraged by her brand new, drug dealing friends to do so. She claimed my mother beat her with a belt buckle over 25 times and that she "could barely walk" -- despite hiking over 15 miles to her new boyfriends house and back the very next day (after being allowed to sleep over in a known drugdealering house is Port Jervis, with a group of peers with no adult supervision, by CPS). The bruises that CPS took pictures of as evidence looked like she had several pebble-sized, light bruises -- any doctor could have immediately proven she was not viciously beaten with a belt buckle until she couldn't stand. Yet this woman believed every lie that my sister told her. She also made up her own lies, claiming that my sister had no access to her clothes and that they were being intentionally stopped from picking them up; that my sister wasn't "educated" enough; tried to make the judge attempt to force my other sister, who is over 18, to speak to my youngest sister; and assumed countless false situations that didn't happen. This woman enabled a mentally unstable teenager in recklessly lying to the court, and encouraged my sister to live in a group home (which she left as quickly as possible and immediately got pregnant). She aided and abetted a young woman destroy her relationship with her family during her adolescence; and now that our dad has passed she has no chance to reconcile with him. If I sat here the dredged up all the details about the situation and how this lawyer made everything worse, I could write for hours. Suffice it to say that you should consider another representitive in court before hiring her as your attourney.

I hired this attorney because she was recommended to me by someone who said she was well respected in the court room. When I first met with her, before I retained her, she informed me that the suit was frivolous and that she would get my ex husband to pay for it in court. She explained how she was on... my children and my side and would make sure that all the violations would be addressed and dealt with. I retained her with the very last of my money, apprehensive but she did promote to get my ex to reimburse ALL of her fees. She was all talk. Not only did she not get the suit dismissed, she also did NOT get her fees reimbursed (after miraculously billing me for almost exactly the $5,000 retainer), WORST of all she let my ex's attorney walk all over her. Even though my children and their lawyer said that they wanted no change in the visitation schedule, she basically told me I had no choice but to give into my ex's demands and give up more time weekly as well as an extra week in the summer that is NOT reciprocal for me. I would have been better served by going to legal aid and keeping my money. She bullied me into signing away things that I did not agree with by telling me that, "I had no choice." It was a horrible experience and I regret ever letting her represent my children and myself. It was like my ex had 2 attorneys working for him, and I was alone in my fight.