Jennifer R. Smart

Does not return phone calls in a timely manner doesn't respond to e-mails promptly like she assured she would....did not do what she was suppose to when she was suppose to do it instead she dragged it out for over 6 months and still I did not get all that I hired her services for. I am still having ...to do the main portion myself which is stopping the income withholding for child support....awfull attorney and if it aint her then its her Paralegal...she didn't seemed prepared for our hearing...the day before he sent X amount of pages for me to review that evening she is not someone I will hire again...

I was given Ms Smart's name from a legal referral service. I called her six times over 4 weeks before I finally got a response from a secretary. We set up an appt. I took off work and another family member took off school. 10 minutes before the appointment (we were already in the parking lot), th...e secretary told us that she wouldn't be able to make it. We made another appointment. The same thing happened at the same time of the same day of a different week. We made a third appointment. We finally met with her, and she talked generally about her fees. She seemed OK, so we agreed to move forward and handed over some highly confidential paperwork. The next step, she said, was for her to do some preliminary work and that she’d get back to us on Friday. I got very busy for the next few weeks (because I have my own job). When I realized she hadn’t called me back, I assumed she was probably really busy and waited even longer. After a long while, our patience ran out…we realized she had forgotten us or didn’t really want to work on our case. We contacted her to get our paperwork back. She said that “I was looking forward to working on that for you and never received a payment”. Ugh… furthermore she said that “[I] do not maintain documents for people who haven’t hired my services because I would run out of places to keep them”. I read this as “I lost your paperwork” which is horrifying because of the confidential nature. I can only pray that it somehow got shredded and is not stuck in a legal reference book in her library. The implication that we didn’t pay is silly, I was desperate enough to pay pretty much any amount and had the means to pay. I assume that she is administratively incompetent from this series of events. Other alternatives for her behavior are even less generous, so I’ll leave those out. Needless to say, the legal help we needed is still outstanding and our family is still suffering from the effects.