Edward James Marshall

My wife and I adopted an 8 year old girl 5 years ago, which makes her 13 today. DSS left out an enormous amount of details dealing with severe mental issues that wasn’t found out until later. The adoption has literally failed. I hired James because I wanted to see if there was a process where we were... able to have the biological mother be able to take back her daughter. The mother wanted her back, the daughter wanted to be back with her mother, and we were totally for this to happen. James took several months with this case with a lot of delays with non-communication, but after a few months, he advised us that he was able to get the green light from the clerk of court and from DSS that we could bring the girl back to the bio mom in NC., so we did. DSS worked the case for a little over 2 months, but they decided to come up with a story that my wife and I illegally placed the daughter back with her mother & if we didn’t have the daughter removed, we would be facing federal neglect charges. My wife and I were following the direction of our hired attorney James Marshall (when he did communicate to us which was very rare). My wife and I couldn’t get the time off to fly back to NC., but fortunately a friend of ours was able to so they could get the daughter picked back up again. The daughter has been fairly ok since she has been back with the exception of when the Air Marshalls has to get involved one time during the flight back because of the daughter disrupting the last flight (which is a different story). We had left several emails and phone messages to James, and he would not respond back for 2-3 weeks at a time. James verbally assured me he had connections with DSS and felt positive that the bio mom being able to adopt her bio daughter back could be a possibility. I understand that no attorney can ever predict a case, but I never saw a situation where we would have DSS blaming us for placing our daughter illegally with the mother and DSS threatening federal neglect charges against us because we were following our attorney’s advice. Between the attorney obviously not having experience in this matter, and the slow to no communication from him wor weeks at a time, I would not recommend this attorney to anyone.