We hired this lawyer to manage my mother's estate and ensure our interests as the heirs. From the beginning he overpromised and under delivered. He will go on and on about how much he knows about everything, he loves to talk, is a big name dropper, and yet when it came to managing the various affair...s that came up in the process of handling the estate, we found him extremely difficult to work with, and could do things in a timely and efficient manner without creating a huge headache for everyone. There were several inconsistencies between what he said and what he did. He struggled with the basics which is surprising for someone who has been doing this for so long.
For example he was unable to retrieve a $200 security deposit from the apartment building my mother was living in, not because there were damages, but rather because “no one from the apartment building management would call him back”. This sort of thing happened time and time again as he could not retrieve a phone record from the phone company, he did not know how to get tax information on our house that is publicly accessible online, etc. He also inexplicably insisted on hiring his own people for home repairs. These people charged significantly more than the contractors we wanted to hire for the same work that was to be paid for by the estate. Why hire more expensive contractors when the people we wanted to hire were people who were licensed, had done work for us in the past, and were charging less to the estate? We believe he was getting a significant kick back that was offsetting what he was losing from dipping into the estate funds. Especially since he was pushing to do repairs on things that were unnecessary, would drive up the cost, and not covered by the insurance company’s assessment of damages.
He also was in charge of getting the homeowner’s insurance company to come up from their initial repair payout. He did get them to pay more but he claimed it was the maximum they were willing to pay. After one phone call to our own contractor, our contractor got the insurance company to pay out even more.
The amount of effort we used to convince the lawyer to not use his contractors, and that we wanted to use our own contractors caused needless delays and headaches. We had to set up a meeting in the lawyer’s office just to get him to call off his contractors! It seemed that he was working against us instead of for us?! By his own admission, he can be a real “prick” and we exclusively saw that side of him following our initial meeting with him where he was on his best behavior.
He also created several unnecessary delays by claiming he did not use email and that everything had to be done by phone conversation (where there is no record of communication) and/or snail mail where things are needlessly delayed. Halfway through the entire process, he magically started communicating by email once we had a realtor of our choosing involved in the process for selling of the house.
Beware…he will try to get you to use his brother who is a realtor. Imagine the conflict of interest! We hired our own realtor who was able to keep the lawyer in check on several occasions. But the sale of the home was also majorly botched. The lawyer failed to address our rent back contingency in reviewing the final sale of home contract. This is a blunder of epic proportions. Because he missed this, the occupants were forced to move 2 months before they were ready and were only informed of this by the buyer's agent, not the lawyer who has tasked for reviewing the contract and whose signature was on the contract as representing the best interests of the estate. Even after we confronted him on this, he refused to admit is negligence. We felt his ego and difficulty in working with our realtor really set us back and made the entire process much more difficult than it had to be. Believe half of what you see and none of what he says. My recommendation, stay away or you will learn the hard way.
