Azelie Ziegler Shelby

We hired Azelie Shelby to represent us with the trademark office - the other party had filed for an extension of time to oppose but, in the meantime, wanted to work with us on an amicable settlement which involved amending our original trademark application, which we were open to and saw no problem w...ith - She had three whole months before the extension expired to work something out with the other party so the opposition hearing could be averted. But, instead, three months passed by without any communication with us from her firm or her (even though she had both our email address and phone number on file and was explicitly asked to reach out to us and keep us informed and updated anytime) - The result was that we ended up receiving a formal Notice of Opposition from USPTO at the end of the three month period and were forced to call her office ourselves to find out what went wrong. She chose to blame the other party, proceeded to charge us for every single interaction that happened during this time (even follow up emails from us asking about the status of our case) and also asked us to put another huge retainer down to defend and protect our trademark, despite the fact that she failed to do the job she was hired for in the first place. Being a small, family-owned startup business, we simply could not afford another retainer so, in good faith, we just paid her the balances due and decided not to engage her services again - For the record, we had also consulted other lawyers informally, as a backup, during that time and they all agreed that we had a good and sound case but because we had already hired Azelei Shelby we just waited and trusted that she would act in our best interest. There was no reason not to. Unfortunately, that did not happen. We lost a very good and fairly strong case and had to abandon our trademark because she took too long to make a proper move and we were left with no time to hire another attorney to save our case before it became too late. And for us it was, indeed, too late but at that time we were too naive to realize that, from some attorney's standpoint, there is more money to be made in lawsuits and endless legal hearings than resolving a trademark dispute quickly & amicably for the client before it gets to that irreversible point. We hope this review helps others learn from what turned out to be a very painful experience for us.