Kelly Robert McCarty

Hired Kelly for about three months for my divorce / child custody case. We had our temporary orders hearing and it went sideways for a number of reasons. We were towards the end of the docket to be called and had to hurry through our complex case. The opposing counsel brought up several damaging t...opics that I felt Kelly should have objected to(other legal professionals have agreed). Also, in his strategy, he threw things out that he planned to elaborate on later, in an attempt to show my ex in a negative light, but we ran out of time, and it ended up having just the opposite effect. Lastly, my financial info sheet was somehow missed and not entered into evidence even though we thought it had been submitted. In all fairness, some of these missteps may have been corrected had there been sufficient time. However, that wasn't the case and it really hurt us when the judgment was made. Kelly suggested and filed for a De Nova hearing to have the case heard all over again by a different judge, but the new court date had to be pushed way back due to both the court's and our lawyer's conflicting schedules. The current 2-2-3 visitation schedule was really hard on me and traumatic for my 6 month old. It completely changed her routine. Instead of me being her primary care giver, she was ordered to daycare 5 days a week. I was counting down the days till the new hearing. As the new hearing approached, Kelly started to really pressure me to make a deal with my husband that was still 50/50 visitation but with the addition of $1000 child support. My ultimate reason for wanting the new hearing was to get my baby out of the daycare system and on a more traditional schedule where I would designate the primary residence. Despite my objections, Kelly continued to pressure me. I finally gave in to a deal. The problem was Kelly did not fully discuss te details and an important stipulation. The result of that defeated my main reason for accepting the deal in the first place. Kelly was not available to discuss my concerns when I saw the inconsistencies for the first time in a draft written up by the opposing counsel. Days went by and then an incident occurred between my ex and I resulting from confusion about the details in the agreement. Kelly finally spoke to me the next day, but wanted discuss his invoice before anything else. Oddly, after 3 months, this was the very first time he was invoicing me. He had also just accepted $2500, just days earlier, that he said would cover his services for about the next 6 weeks. When he finally addressed my concerns about the descrepancies in the new order, he just told me he had been clear. He had actually not discussed the details at all. So my understanding, the day we waived our de nova hearing, and read the new orders before the judge, was not in align with what the agreement actually was unfortunately. We didn't get too far into that conversation before Kelly quit. I've also now learned that because I waived my right to a new hearing, the visitation schedule that I was very unhappy with will likely stick. We'd have had a chance to try to persuade a judge to grant a more favorable visitation schedule had we had the hearing.