Barak Lurie

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.