Karen Taylor

She was my assigned public defender for a CINA case on my child, who has mental health issues. At first i was apprehensive, assuming prosecutors and public defenders are buddies, however, ms. Taylor negotiated terms to the benefit to me and my child with dept of human services. She made sure all alle...gations were struck from record without my request and treated me with dignity and respect.

I had a very long drawn out divorce. My legal representation was very poor. I hired Karen Taylor because she sold me on years of experience. After hiring her and through just over a year of preceeding and countless issues that I was forced to babysit my legal team. (She may charge less and hour...... but she and her team padded my bill so bad that finally one of her staff stood up for me. I have text messages and emails to prove this statement.) I had court dates where my X was not served for court, paperwork not filled correctly, improper verbiage for the fillings we had to make to protect me...only to find out no body proof read, or even checked before filling. IF YOU NEED LEGAL ASSISTANCE DO NOT HIRE TAYLOR LAW FIRM!!!! I am still in process of filling with the bar association due to her lack of legal ability and very unprofessional business operations.

Karen is very money motivated. She could have cared less about my case. I don’t think she spent any time or effort preparing. Yet, my check was cashed in a flash. I was ridiculously over billed, and she refused to give me back the remainder of my money from what was supposed to be my trust account. ...

Ms. Taylor was retained in December after I was charged with a felony sex crime, of which I am innocent and have been completely falsely accused. While at first she demonstrated zeal and vigour and we were very happy with her, this good performance quickly deteriorated. We brought to her attention se...veral issues with the police during the arrest that could greatly benefited our defence, which she reviewed and agreed with. We gave express orders to file several motions in court, and she agreed they would be tremendously beneficial to our case. However, after four months of being told these motions were to be filed "in a week or so" yet never having actually been filed, we began to grow concerned that she may be ignoring our case. For three months we tried to contact her at her office on numerous occasions (within reason and not excessively) to meet in person to discuss the case, giving her ample opportunity to return our calls and being very patient and sympathetic to her busy schedule as an attorney. However we soon realised that we couldn't give her the benefit of the doubt any longer and we grew concerned and started to "connect the dots", as they say. Finally we began to research her legal career history. An additional review of online judicial records available to the public of our case showed no record of filing any motion, for any reason (beyond continuance). Previous customer reviews of her performance as well as reviews of publicly-available transcripts of her former disciplinary hearings by the state licensing authorities bore striking resemblance to our experience with her, and after consulting with several other attorneys (who agreed that her performance was greatly lacking) we finally decided to part ways with Ms. Taylor. From a strictly moral point of view I find it absolutely reprehensible that she continued to mislead and neglect our case when it was clearly a case that was very important to us and could possibly have life-long ramifications for us. After deliberation, we decided to lodge a formal complaint with the Iowa State Bar Association, as we felt that we had a moral obligation to do so based on her gross negligence and utter incompetence in legal matters. She has billed us thousands of dollars extra in ridiculous fees for services that we never received, and I’m not sure if we can recover any of the money we already spent. However, we told her office that we refuse to pay any further fees to her due to her behaviour, and we were denied our case file due to not paying these fees. I give anyone who is considering her services to look elsewhere, ANYWHERE ELSE but her office for good legal representation!

I retained the services of Karen Taylor in 2011 to handle the modification of my child support/custody/visitation decree. At the time I thought I had made a good choice in representation. I began to realize that there might be a problem when I had difficulty getting my phone calls returned. I don't k...now if this office felt that my case was not important or if they do this to every client, but either way it reflects poorly on the firm as a whole. I work for a law firm and understand the importance of client service. What is worse is that it happened on several occasions. The main issue I have is with manner in which Ms. Taylor handled the hearing on my behalf. This was a matter in which Ms. Taylor expressed confidence that we would likely prevail. Halfway through, I wished the opposing counsel was representing me. I can't say Ms. Taylor is always as weak and ineffective in court, but she was that day. Not only did we not prevail, afterwards when I asked her what just happened, she could only shrug her shoulders in response. I understand that there are no guarantees when you go into court, but the manner in which you are represented matters. From the lack of simple customer service to the final outcome, I remain convinced there better choices in Des Moines when it comes to family law matters.