Johnna Michele Teal

Johnna Teal

This review is both laughable and slanderous. You should be ashamed of yourself Peggy for your bold faced lies. I’ve never had to fire a client before, but there is a first time for everything. Your review is negative merely because I called you out on your unreasonable behavior and withdrew as your attorney. First, the documents you mentioned us charging you for compiling is based on a process called discovery. If you recall, when we took over your case last year, your discovery responses were months overdue and there was already an order compelling you to turnover documents. We were required to compile and produce over 2000 pages of documents in a matter of only a few weeks. This was because you were not cooperating with your first attorney and refused to turnover your records. You gave your first attorney a difficult time and you gave us an even more difficult time over the course of our representation of you. We advised you to take the settlement offer of $5K. We asked you why you had not previously taken the $5K settlement and you said very succinctly “I’d rather pay you a $5K retainer than pay my husband a dime”. You were a difficult and unreasonable client from day 1. Your issue was and still is that you had to give your husband more than “a dime” during settlement. What you failed to mention in your review is that even though your husband was no longer willing to settle for $5K, we were able to get a settlement dividing the estate 65/35 with you getting 65% and your husband getting 35%. Texas law presumes a 50/50 split. We were even able to get your husband to agree to back off all reimbursement claims he had toward your first residence which saved you over $50K. Do you recall the mediator (who happened to be a 20 year former family law judge) doing the math and telling you that you needed to settle? Yes Ms Howard, we advised you to settle the case in mediation; and we were very prepared at mediation despite your untrue statements of preparedness. What we were not prepared for at mediation was your failure to disclose assets that were known to you (but not one document on that asset had been turned over by you to my office). The law requires you to disclose and divide all community assets. Hiding or attempting to hide assets that is divisible by the court is not allowed. Further, you made your case more difficult by purchasing a house during a divorce when 1) there was injunctions in place telling you not to purchase property; 2) we advised you not to purchase property; 3) but you still did despite the court order prohibiting such conduct and despite your lawyer telling you not to make any large purchase and to definitely not buy a house using community funds. It was a foreseeable consequence that your husband’s attorney would sue to collect a portion of the equity on the new house. And by the way, it’s not okay to put your new house in a family member’s name when you are on the contract and you use community money as the down payment. The fact that your family members became apart of your divorce action is not surprising nor an unforeseeable consequence. However, again you did what you wanted; refused to take our advise because you did not think the law applied to you. At our very first meeting I told you “you stand a lot to lose and your husband has everything to gain. You need to settle and hopefully the $5K offer is still on the table”. Do you remember that and my follow up email conversation stating the exact same position? Of course you do, but again, you did not want to give your husband “not even a dime”. It’s unfortunate that your bitterness for marrying and divorcing a man who brought nothing into the marriage has caused you to turn your anger and bitterness towards a legal professional who had nothing but your best interests at heart. I hope that time and prayer heals your wounds. Signed- The attorney who fired her client