Samuel Jay Levine

My wife and I hired Levine in April 2015 an effort to get her green card and to help with an immigration court case. On our first visit Levine found out her court case was located in San Antonio. He told us he would have to go to San Antonio to check out the court file. We would have to pay for hi...s expenses to fly there in addition to the $7500 he charged us for the case. We then got a notice for an interview with immigration. About a week before the interview which he told us he was going to attend with us he has us do a pre-interview meeting. but when we got to the meeting he started dialing the phone for air fares and hotel rooms in the San Antonio area. He said he needed to go right away to San Antonio but the court case was a year away. WE spent about an hour watching him try to locate air fares and hotel rooms. he said that he would negotiate the very lowest price for us because we were his clients and he was watching out for our money. Then he started trying to find a hotel room near the interview site. He told us that he lived in Georgetown and that since the interview was in Fairfax VA at 8:30am he could not commute. We would have to put him up in a hotel room at $270. i told him I would let him know the next day if we could come up with the money. We never did talk about the interview even though this meeting was called by him to address the questions in the interview. The next day I told him that we could not afford him to go to San Antonio right now and that after the summer the airfare was half of what he told us. I also told him we could not pay for his hotel room the night before the interview. so about 2 days before the interview Levine sent us an email saying that he was charging $270 to our account for the hotel room the night before the interview. I called him and told him that I was not going to pay for his hotel room and furthermore I thought it was very unprofessional of him to ask for this. If he had to appear in court for a client he surely would not ask for a hotel room every time he had to appear in court and the distance was not very far. He told me that if I did not pay for the hotel room he would not attend the interview. I was floored. He has told us several times he was coming to the interview and he never told us that he would not attend if we did not put him up in a hotel room. He was trying to extort money from us in order to go to the interview! I told him I would not pay and he said he would not go to the interview. It just so happens that the interview was especially important for us because in our case the interview had a higher burden of proof than normal. It was important he show up. We went to the interview and the interviewer told us about the higher burden of proof and we agreed to go ahead with the interview without Levine. She then asked for a G28 form. That form tells immigration who our lawyer is and there was no G28 form in the file. So not only did Levine not show up at a very important interview he failed to let Immigration know that he was our lawyer which means he had no intention of representing us even thought we had paid him $2000 up front. He really let us down. Now I have to try and recover the money we have give him up front. he did absolutely nothing but dial for air fares and hotel rooms and I have since found out that we can have the court case moved up here to VA and there is no reason he had to travel to San Antonio. I am begging all of you to not consider this hack lawyer when you are having immigration issues. I have found a new lawyer who is wonderful and I would definitely reccomend her. Not Samuel J Levine! I have all of the documentation to back up my claims