Karen Taylor

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.

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!