Barak Lurie

Barak Lurie and his staff are extremely nice and friendly, however kindness doesn't win cases. I worked with Lurie & Park Law firm for over 2 years on a simple case. They lacked knowledge about things that I had no clue about as a client. I was asked to pay more and more since we were "almost at... the end", however the case took me deep into debt. A lot of jargon and technical verbiage but no results. They actually dropped the ball and it ended up costing me $100,000+ in legal fees (to their firm) and $150,000+ in other losses which I would have probably not lost had I used a layer which was more competent. I was highly disappointed by their actual performance. My advice is not to find someone who knows their material and is performance oriented, not just a schmoozer.

We had a very disappointing experience with this firm. My elderly mother sought their help after her business partner stopped sending her dividends, completely cutting her out of the business. During our initial consultation, Barack assured us that this was a straightforward case. We paid $25,000 ...upfront, expecting diligent representation, but after four months, nothing had been done—not even basic communication with the opposing attorney. When an update hearing took place, the firm failed to address the crucial issue of my mother not receiving payments. I trusted Barack, in part because he presented himself as a person of faith, but unfortunately, our trust was misplaced. This firm seemed more focused on collecting fees than actually advocating for my mother. Extremely disappointed in the lack of action and professionalism.

I went to Lurie to recover damages from a buyer who walked away from a purchase contract, on my commercial RE property, My transactional attorney and I found out soon that this guy is incompetent, he drafted a claim full of errors that made no sense at all, I found out later, that he had lost the bac...kground material I had given him. the entire claim was revised 3 times, by my other attorney, before it was filed. After filing the claim, the property went into bankruptcy due to high vacancy, and while in bankruptcy, we quickly, managed to settle the case, in a form of selling the property to the original buyer for much less than the original contract price of $13.5MM. Lurie had strongly recommended that I take this settlement, but did not tell me about his intention to charge me about $1.5MM pursuant to the ambiguous contingency provision in our retainer agreement, calling for 15% fee on any damages recovered(including purchase, which I was not aware of, and never discussed prior to the RA signing) When I found out that Lurie was tying to apply 15% fee on the entire sales proceeds, I told him that,he did not obtain any recovery of damages by selling my property at 30% below market value, and, its unreasonable to pay 15% from the sale price after losing my entire investment, and I would be in a better position had I have walked away from this property. Mr. Lurie did not care, he went ahead to file $1.5MM claim at BK court, for about 40 hours of his work on the case(my attorney did most of the negotiation with the buyer, and asked Lurie, the attorney of record , to stay idle) Lurie filed his claim in violation of section 6200 that requires to give a client mandatory notice of right to arbitrate, but he got away with it telling the bankruptcy judge bunch of lies and managed to get about $370,000 for the 40 hours of his work, while his client lost everything. This terrible award decision is currently under appeal. One more thing you should know. He have signed the retainer agreement under non existing entity of Lurie and Park LLP, we found out that this entity is not a legally formed and is not registered with the CA Secretary of State.

I hired Barak Lurie to represent me in a case that did not appear to be too difficult as it should have been time-barred. The main issue of this case was that the government had accused me of a fraudulent transfer of real estate into a trust some eight years ago. He sold himself as an expert in this ...area but then was not able to go the straightest route to a dismissal bun instead filed a nonmeritorious motion for a more definite statement,which was not only unsuccessful, but he charged me thousands of dollars for this disservice. This motion was denied because plaintiff US Department of Justice answered all questions in the reply to the motion. In other words, the need for a motion could have easily been avoided by a few phone conversations and e-mails. The government had sued under UFTA abd ee did not know that there is an absolute claims extinguishment period of seven years under the California UFTA, Civil Code section 3439.09 while the government had sued after 8 years. The government had told him they were right and Mr. Lurie just went with it. He told me several times what a pleasure it was to work with me while at the same time draining my resources (that was probably the source for his pleasure) and if I would not have pulled the plug after $15,000 I would certainly have lost the case. All the details and a copy of a bar complaint being filed can be found at www.RealBadLawyers.com.