Karlyn Rosemarie Hylton

Ms. Hylton represented me in a paternity action in Seminole County and a child support case in Orange County in 2014. She was completely ineffective in both. I brought both cases to Ms. Hylton because my child's mother was alienating me from my child in order to maximize child support. There is a...n inverse relationship between the amount a non custodial parent pays and the amount of overnights that parent spends with the child. What this means is that the less you see your child, the more you pay in child support. The mother knew this and exploited it to get max support while doing everything possible to deny me any sort of visits with my child for three years. There was no paternity order on file because the mother and her attorneys used all sorts of mechanisms to avoid court. Avoiding a ruling maintained the status quo. I paid over a thousand dollars a month in support for a child that didn't even know I was her father. I made this clear to Ms. Hylton during our first conversation. She promised me that she had the expertise to remedy this situation. She seemed smooth, polished and professional. Then, she received my retainer. Once she had my payment, Ms. Hylton became very hard to reach. I was able to get her office pretty easily. However, they were unprofessional, rude and short. They worked hard to make it seem as though the client was a nuisance whenever one tried to contact Ms. Hylton. Filings came back with typos and poor syntax. Each correction or revision cams at my expense. I would be placed on hold to only be told that Ms. Hylton wasn't available. I was told Ms. Hylton would call me back, but with no ensuing follow up call. This happened regularly. However, Ms. Hylton would email me questionnaires to help prepare my case. While I would painstakingly answer them, Ms. Hylton would enter our telephone conferences without having read them. She would ask me the same questions on the questionnaire. We would spend an hour on the phone with me verbally answering questions that I had already answered in written form. At first, I believed she wanted to flesh out my answers. Then it dawned me on me that she hadn't reviewed the questionnaires at all. Furthermore, she wanted to revisit aspects of my case that were already complete. For example, she was focused on interrogatories that were already completed and filed. She wanted me to redo them while ignoring me every time I told her they were already done. It didn't take long to realize that she would use legalese in effort to project expertise. The last straw was when she negated to tell me that I would need a notary to swear me in so I could appear telephonically. I learned I needed one less than an hour before the hearing. Notaries are a dime a dozen in Brooklyn. And I managed to find one who didn't know how to swear a person in. The judge promptly rescheduled the hearing for 4 months later. I ended our relationship and represented myself. I was able to get in front of a judge. After being told by Ms. Hylton I would see my child every other holiday and for two weeks in the summer, I received a different result by pleading my own case. I now see my child every long break from school, one half of every holiday break and the entire summer. My child support was drastically reduced and the mother pays for some of the airfare. If you are looking for good representation in the midst of being devastated and destroyed by the dissolution of your family, I would not recommend Ms. Hylton. I can't speak for her other cases, but in mine, she made a bad situation worse by being unprepared, offered inferior representation to that I provided myself while billing every step of the wag for shoddy work. I hope she has gotten better in the past year. I found her to be very disappointing. I hope she was able to provide better representation to her other clients.