Jamie Matthew Kerr

We (client and supporting family) hired Jamie for a divorce and child custody case involving family violence. Jamie took his time getting the facts of the case and discussing plans. The emergency protective order expired during this time, but he did not respond to our request to extend it. His explan...ations would be minimal, prompting us to ask questions, then he still wouldn't answer our questions, all while charging for each email and phone call. Finally, after over a month of working with him, he showed us an original petition draft that was full of factual errors and asked for all the wrong things. We finally had to cut our losses and start from scratch with another attorney.

Jamie and the folks at this firm are exceptional at what they do. They handle difficult situations with great compassion and professionalism. Even humor when it's called for. In my case they advised me on and handled a divorce which I dragged out for much longer than necessary, yet they were always t...here for me without judgement. They work hard to understand your situation and treat all parties with care and understanding. An excellent attorney and an excellent firm

Our case was an adoption of a step child where we could not find the biological father to serve him documents. Jamie was dedicated and knew what needed to be done. We finally were able to locate the father and changed our strategy. Due to previous custody/child support rulings, we needed still mor...e paperwork. Jamie saw it through to the end and billed us fairly for the extra work that our case needed. Emily was efficient on the research and paperwork end. This is a lengthy process, took just over a year from start to finish, mainly due to issues specific to our case.

Beware of being billed for far more hours than you requested. If you have a smaller task such as reviewing an existing prenup draft, I’d steer clear of this office and find an attorney who will do the work for a flat fee you negotiate ahead of time. I am sure there are options for local attorneys ...that are far more above board about their costs and that will follow your requests. I worked with Jamie Kerr on reviewing an existing prenup that my fiancee’s attorney had drafted. I had already reviewed the agreement myself and we had gone through a few revisions with my fiancee’s attorney before I was ready to find my own attorney to do a review for me. I had never worked with an attorney before, and I was uncomfortable with depositing a $2500 retainer for something as small as a prenup review as I felt I would have little recourse if I were billed for far more hours than I wanted to spend on this review. During our initial consult meeting we discussed the retainer and my concerns about how much this would end up costing. I asked that Jamie only spend time on major issues with the document so as to limit time spent on my review. Before agreeing to further services I requested in writing that we not use a retainer and that Jamie not spend more than an hour or so on the review without telling me that this was shaping up to be a much larger task with unexpected issues in the prenup so as to get my approval to spend more time on it. He received approval to move forward without using a retainer and I assumed got the message about how much I wanted to spend on this review. I received a new draft of the agreement from my fiancee’s attorney with changes made based on how we decided to simplify it in the initial consult meeting with Jamie. I did exactly as Jamie requested to help him get through the review more quickly by giving him a redlined version of the new draft with Word’s track changes feature turned on so he could easily see exactly what was changed. I was blindsided when I ended up being billed for almost six hours of work on top of the initial consult fee, so nearly $2000 for a prenup *review*. This is more than double what we paid to have the entire agreement drafted and put through several revisions, and multiple times the $500 range we’d heard of for a prenup review. In our initial consult meeting Jamie insisted that he had no way to determine ahead of time how long this review would take. I believe he had enough information after that meeting to inform me that my request to spend another hour or so reviewing it would fall far short of how long he would likely spend on it. Not giving me realistic expectations demonstrated very poor client management. With Jamie we did only one round of review and the agreement did not become any more complicated than what we went over together in the consult meeting. He also ignored my request to inform me that the review was taking longer than I anticipated and to ask how I would like to proceed at that point.