David Pratt

nice guy when you meet him, seems knowledgeable, a friend of mine recommended. Very high hourly rates which is OK if you get the work done. crazy billings, vague. Complex tax issue, said he could handle it, but couldn't. Cost a lot of extra money trying to fix it, never admits when he makes a mistake... so harder to fix.  Starts getting loud and arrogant, blames everyone else. I heard a rumor he's starting to get suits against him, getting negative attention for the authorities, I checked it out and it's true, a lot of that stuff is public. so I got away. I flatly do not recommend. Make up your own mind but research deeply.

It never occurred to me that hiring David Pratt would need us to hire a separate firm just to keep an eye on him. Basically we unknowingly signed documents giving him complete power and then he used these docs to deplete with relentless high-fee billing. He charged nearly half of our after-tax assets.... He held our funds and property for many years, never explaining why, until I learned too late that he had been waiting for all the statutes of limitations to run out. There is a case against him by another family in federal court, the 11th Circuit, Miami Dade, Florida which describes really closely what we went through. Pratt was formerly with Proskauer Rose. Then he left and joined McDermott Will & Schute along with a half dozen lawyers that he persuaded to leave with him. Thanks AVVO for your service to Justice.

A number of years ago we went to David Pratt, Proskauer Rose, for pre-planning work and he made a lot of sense to us, proposing creating complex structures, that impressed us. But we have another attorney who handles our company's commercial contracts work. She showed us how the documents Mr. Pratt h...ad written for us to sign would have given him absolute control over everything we owned, we were basically signing everything over to him. In a worst case scenario he could deplete and mismanage all we had built up, with nothing we could do about it. So we paid his bill, walked away, no harm done. But in the last few years we have heard that the worst case scenario has happened to others, so we decided to write this review to recommend caution.