Mary Ann Ruiz

Mary Ann Ruiz, the attorney at the Condo Clinic, is dishonest and incompetent as far as we are concerned. Luckily, the first bit of legal advice that she eventually offered us, after having to wait six weeks for it, seemed so strange that we consulted another attorney and were advised to fire Mary... Ann Ruiz. We took that attorney's alternate advice regarding our case, which was to insist that the Association obey the law or we wouldn't pay their Special Assessment, and the Association acquiesced and gave in to our demands within three days. The Association had been in violation of a Statute, and we had wanted that corrected for our own legal protection, as another attorney had already recommended. Mary Ann Ruiz had been advising us to just pay Association, which would have left us powerless to dispute what happened to that money later, and we could have ended up losing $25000. Mary Ann quoted a Statute to support her position that the Association was correct, but the Statute that she quoted on the phone, and later sent us, was the wrong Statute, and not applicable to the situation. She had looked up the Statute quickly while she was on the phone with us, trying to prove that the Association was within their rights, and we should just pay them. We pointed out to Mary Ann Ruiz that she was quoting the wrong Statute, and to please clarify, but she neglected to, like many other questions important to us, and without admitting that she had been quoting the wrong statute, or clarifying that indeed the Association was in fact in violation of a Statute, she gave us a bit of generic advise about not paying them after all, and told us that we were on our own though since she was leaving for vacation within minutes. Even though that special assessment was just a minor side issue, and not the main reason why we had retained her, that seemed pretty incompetent to us, so we instructed her to stop working on our file and to provide her bill, and we anticipated the majority of our retainer back, since she had just told us that she hadn't spent any time coming up to speed with the particulars of our circumstances yet...after six weeks. We were shocked to learn however that she was claiming our entire retainer to the dollar, claiming to have researched areas that we had repeatedly told her that we were not interested in until after knowing generally where we stood overall, after she had come up to speed about our circumstances - which is what she had said that she would use the retainer for. So we paid $3000 for one phone call where she gave us some generic advise not specific to us, and exhibited that she hadn't listened to us, or thought to understand our level of knowledge, or invited questions we might have, where she quoted us the wrong Statute erroneously defending the Association, never admitted it, reversed her opinion, and then abandoned us literally minutes before leaving for her vacation, on the eve of an important deadline for us. That was our entire interaction that cost us $3000. On top of all of that, she doesn't talk like you'd hope your attorney would, and her emails are the same. No formalities.. like receiving a text message from a teenager. When we tried to correct the misunderstandings with her, of which we had many unfortunately, she would shout over us trying to defend herself instead of listening for understanding. Mary An Ruiz was a waste of 8 weeks and $3200, and an embarrassment to have representing us, who consumed our entire retainer on "research" we told her not to do. Our new attorney is preparing litigation to recover our retainer.