Jessica Arends

My siblings and I unexpectedly and tragically lost our parent and required probate services. Amidst tremendous grief and shock, we met with Ms. Arends for an initial appointment to see what this lawyer is about and what we need to do to go through probate. My siblings and I had never worked with a la...wyer before as we are young adults and could barely process any information as we were in such shock from this unexpected death of our parent. Before we knew what was happening, as we were never asked if indeed we even wanted to go with Ms. Arends as our probate lawyer, we were signing papers. We should not have, we didn't know what we were dong, but we thought, "It's okay at least its one less thing to deal with right now." First, Ms. Arends assumed we were going with her as our lawyer and even charged us for the initial appointment. Second, probate proceeding took much longer than necessary. Because probate paperwork was taking weeks for the office to put together, we had to keep calling to see where proceedings were at and the progress being made. This resulted in numerous charges from office personnel simply because we wanted to know why it was taking weeks for probate to be filed when they said it would take only a week; we desperately needed access to banks and accounts to be able to deal with the estate's needs. We feel as though it took unnecessarily long for Ms. Arends to draw up paperwork for probate filing, that we should not have had to wait weeks for it to be filed, and that we should not have been charged for every twice a week call to check if Ms. Arends is doing her job in filing probate in a timely manner. Once we had waited a month and she had still not filed probate papers, we decided to go with another lawyer. For comparison, this lawyer filed probate proceedings within a day. All in all, this experience left us with a large bill for no probate filings or estate assistance.