Vanessa Marie Riebli

We have worked with a few attorneys in aftermath of high profile violence and ongoing intimidation, and Ms. Riebli compares poorly. My family hired her on the reputation of her old firm Bath Edmonds and how she described herself when she ran for public office. She is nothing like that image, inexperi...enced in criminal defense and lacks requisite care to advocate for victims of VAWG and women and children's rights. First, Ms. Riebli misled us that we were hiring Bath Edmonds, a firm with paralegals, admin staff, and many attorneys. We found out not from her but from another attorney that she no longer worked there and was sole practice while still using her old firm's brand materials. Ms. Riebli had an entitled, condescending and lazy attitude as if routine legal work was beneath her. She no showed for meetings she scheduled and blew it off with excuses that conveyed that her social schedule and ego was more important than our life altering situation we were paying her thousands to handle. When she managed to make it to a scheduled call or respond to a message, she was incoherent and rarely remembered what was going on or her to do list. She also had a flexible stance toward truth (polite way of saying she wasn't always truthful nor astute to dishonesty by others). She knew nothing about relevant laws and legal strategies and said she'd research but never came back with answers. She didn’t know how jails operate, their policies or how to advocate and communicate in their challenging systems. She wasn't knowledgeable or concerned with experiences of victims nor advocacy to ward off revictimization, witness intimidation, etc. Most shocking was unprofessional communications. She sent gossipy texts saying one thing to one person and opposite to another in our family, talking behind people's back as if to stir things up or play people against each other. Petty and naive, as if she didn't think we'd find out, and it was unclear why or what her purpose other than bullying with crude comments about victims who she repped that mocked their losses to violence. In sum, Ms. Riebli acted like a typical politician and bureaucrat steeped in callous and dysfunctional profit-over-people mentality that Johnson County courts and state office she worked for for decades are known for. She's not a reformer or competent advocate. She's two-faced and grandstanding in how she treats clients and vulnerable people generally where colleagues and public don't see. She charged thousands for what we found afterwards was only sending a few emails, casual and unprofessional, and never followed through with medical paperwork or legal filings or letters. After instructing our family to do paperwork that we promptly completed and jumped through hoops to get to her, she never submitted it. She told us she did several things on our behalf that we later checked gov records to find she never did. She said she had no experience in the criminal and injured victim/human rights advocacy at issue after her inaction and mistakes enabled more abuse. Basically, when questioned about why she didn't do what she said needed to be done, her answer was she didn't know how to do it. Yet she kept thousands and refused to refund retainer for work never done and things not ethically billable at $350/hour per bar rules because they are not lawyer work but secretarial that we could have done ourselves (e.g. forwarding a document and asking the sheriff office to ask for status info). We consider her another perpetrator, a predatory disaster capitalist preying on elderly terrified parents who she misled in an emergency and betrayed our entire family.