Jeannie D. Michalski

We hired Jeannie for a divorce after a 1 hour paid consult in which she provided what turned out to be inaccurate legal information. Jeannie insisted that courts in NY do not deal with personal property (such as pets) in a divorce, and the proper venue was Small Claims. Jeannie further insisted that ...the police in NY will enforce an order issued by a Small Claims court, and would send officers out to collect the pets. None of this made any sense to me at the time, but I don’t have experience with NY Small Claims, and apparently neither does Ms. Michalski. In fact, Small Claims cannot issue an order at all. They’re limited to entering a judgement for monetary damages only, and the police in NY do not assist Small Claims plaintiffs collect judgments. Further, “personal property” is absolutely an issue in a divorce, and a competent divorce attorney would be aware of that. Perhaps Ms. Michalski is such a phenomenal litigator that she simply has too many cases to bother with a key aspect of the litigation she was hired to pursue, but she collected a $4,000 retainer and signed us up regardless. But it was her glacially slow handling of the file, and lack of responsiveness that led me to ultimately fire her a month in. By “glacially slow” I mean she did absolutely nothing. Didn’t prepare a complaint, didn’t file a complaint. Nothing. Worse, my email inquiries for status were met with condescending, passive aggressive nonsense passed through her paralegal. In one email I was reminded that “Ms. Michalski had other clients before we hired her”. In another, I requested Ms. Michalski call me, since we’d had no direct contact since I’d mailed the check for the retainer. I did not get a call back, but did get an email from her para letting me know “your file is on her desk as we speak”, but Jeannie was too busy to call me back. We’d hear from her whenever she decided she was ready to return a call to a client. I fired her and asked for a return of the retainer, an itemized invoice and any resulting work product. Her office refunded all but $80. Ms. Michalski charges $300 an hour. Over the course of a month she spent, by her own accounting, less than 20 minutes on my case, and produced nothing, other than giving the defendant a head start to hide assets and avoid support payments. I believe she spent more time coming up with excuses for not working the file than she did actually working the file.