Thomas E. Fulghum

My husband and I hired this attorney to file my husband's immigration papers. We already had our I-130 approval. We needed some records from a neighboring state. We retained him on an hourly basis. Big mistake. His office continued to ask us for records, despite us repeatedly providing them copies......even digital copies emailed to them were apparently lost. Very unorganized and it worries me that so much of our vital records are somewhere out there. He waited about 10 months before making any requests for documents from the other state and we went ahead and obtained most of them ourselves. He suddenly tacked on an additional $1800 flat fee that was NOT in our contract and went ahead and paid himself half from our trust. When I emailed him to tell him I did not approve of this and I felt he was not billing according to the terms of the written agreement he stated that he would only be charging me more if we continue to discuss these billing issues. I was at a loss. We had given him $2900 and he had wasted 10 months and he still had not filed a single thing. I had no other choice but to try to find a way to resolve this billing dispute and so I told him I would have to try the fee dispute resolution service with the bar since he was not being reasonable. He quit and kept all our money and still not a single document filed and we traveled to the other state to obtain all the records needed. When he returned our file to us we had maybe 20 pieces of paper which were mainly documents we provided to him. We were told it would cost us $2840 to file my husband's i485 status. It cost us $2900 and nothing has been filed. We had the difficult task of filing an official complaint to the bar which is not what we wanted to do. Filing a complaint against someone's license is not to be taken lightly. But he made promises, broke his agreement, took our money and left us almost a year later in a worse off situation because he allowed so much time to pass. Many other things in our lives depended on this being completed in a reasonable amount of time...it was never filed. We are truly disappointed and would not recommend this lawyer.