Zakya Ibarguen

I would never hire Zakya Ibarguen again and hope this serves as a warning to anyone considering working with her. She was unprofessional, unorganized, and dropped the ball on a straightforward small claims case. Below are the details. I needed a lawyer to file a small claims court in Broward Co...unty. I would have normally filed this myself, but I no longer reside in Florida - so it would have been difficult to show up in court. Therefore, I used CourtBuddy and found Zakya in December 2018. I explained the case to her: my landlord had kept a portion of the security deposit and I wanted to contest it. Given the evidence we had (photos and improper notice from the landlord), Zakya agreed with me that the case should be fairly straightforward and that a rational person would judge in my favor. Zakya negotiated with the landlord for a few weeks. Since we got no meaningful response, Zakya and I agreed to file the case in small claims court. On January 04, 2019, it was the first time I asked her to file. She responded she could file in mid Jan. I had to contact her on 12 different days by text message asking for a status update. I paid the fees on time (within hours of hearing from her). She finally filed on February 11. In the following months, I started noticing a number of flags. First, she ended up rescheduling or totally missing our scheduled calls at least half the time. Some of the excuses (verbatim from our text messages) included: damaged work phone, took a nap that ended up being extended, sink and dishwasher are overflowing, forgot about 2 important hearings, been busy, have been on trial, tend not to look at phone after 5pm. Now I understand that sometimes life gets in the way, but the frequency of these occurrences was abnormal. The second flag I noticed was she overcomplicated the serving process, likely by not properly understanding the law. An initial court was set and the landlord didn't show up. A second date was set. Once that happened, the landlord wanted to settle. But they wanted to settle for a lot less than I had lost by then (security deposit + court fees + lawyer fees). So I counter-offered the settlement proposal to cover my extra expenses, which I felt was fair. At this point, Zakya gave up, and without even as much as a phone call, she wrote an email in which she claimed: "I feel like we are having irreconciable [sic] difference and I will have to withdraw from further representing you." I was quite upset at her unprofessionalism - she sent that message with very little time for me to find a new lawyer. Now I fully understand it is her right to choose not to represent me. But given the circumstances (we had a strong case, and I would have recouped my fees + security deposit) this felt like someone who was unorganized, or simply unprepared to deal with (and win) a straightforward small claims case.