Daniel Anthony Murphy

Do not hire Dan, he is a drunk. Unfortunately I have known him since I was a child, as my mother (angela) has worked on and off for him si ce 1992. I hired him on advice from my mother, Angela (yes the same), and I am now ruined. According to my new friends in Santa Barbara County Jail I would have gotten a better deal from the public defender. I will always maintain my innocence in the matter, and I pushed for a trial. He said the exact qrong things, to the point that I now believe he was deliberately harming my character, for no real purpose. At this point I am confident that I will sue him for malpractice and misrepresentation, except that no other lawyers will take the case. He basically took a strait foreward case and dragged it out almost two years, only to force me to accept a lousy plea bargain deal. He yelled at me a number of times, and pushed facts to the judge that were false, to try and establish some sort of false pretense. I witnessed him cohorting with the DA on several occasions, and when I called him out about it he berated me. I firmly believe he has codified some sort of criminal arrangement with the courts to ruin his clients, and basically steal their money. Read any of the other reviews here and you will understand, that he is the real criminal. I sincerly doubt the accuracy of the post giving him 5 stars, especially since every other review I have read seems to agree with me.

I hired Dan Murphy to help me with my divorce. It was a really awful time and I really needed a competent legal advocate. Dan told me that he would save me money by having his paralegal, Angie, do most of the work, yet, more often than not it seemed that I met with them both at the same time, and was billed by both of them for dealing with the same matters. It was a double whammy. I often had to repeat myself, which resulted in even more billing. Dan kept me in the dark about the process and never told me what his game plan was. In my opinion, they had to be either incompetent or acting in bad faith. The bills kept coming with, again, in my opinion, absolutely no real progress. I finally concluded that Dan and Angie weren't actually working for me. Sadly, I didn't do my homework before hiring Dan.

I paid Dan a $15,000 cashier's check my first meeting where he took the case. I explained it well, it looked complicated. He then got another $10,000 in a month, so $25,000 altogether in less than 3 months. He blew most of it on a stupid letter writing campaign, on dumb issues with the opposing attorney, then put forth an ex parte motion to withdraw on the eve of an important hearing. He wanted a ton more money to continue, yet he had wasted and overbilled the huge amount of money prepaid to him. When I opposed Dan's motion to withdraw, he told the judge fabrications of why he couldn't represent me, of course he left out it was really all about the money. We had gotten along just fine until he wanted more money. He inflated bills, didn't produce results in court (who cares about stupid letters that don't mean anything legally that Dan spent his billing time on), and dumped me because he didn't like the opposing counsel. He promised not to dump me and then did in a heartbeat when it became difficult for me to get him $15,000 on a monthly basis. Come to find out I hear of two others he did the same thing to. Dan promised he'd get fees from the other side, then told me my judge was cheap on awarding fees, so he wanted out. Besides all this there is much more, he lied to the judge in our hearing about many aspects of representing me in order for him to prevail to get out of this case. If I had my $15,000 back I would gladly run to a new attorney, but my investment in Dan was expensive, and the next will likely be as well. I can't afford to pay tens of thousands to each new attorney and then they want out when I can't keep that pace of fees, a pace they create.

We knew Dan so we hired him to do a grandson visitation case with us. My problems is not about winning and losing the case. My complaint about Dan is his office staff and how incompetent and sloppy their work is. The paralegal, Angie, is the least agreeable person I've ever had to have a conversation with - snarky, insulting, nasty which would have been tolerable if she actually knew what she was doing. However, she does not. She doesn't even remember what she said she would do. As a team, Dan and Angie forgot some very basic procedural criteria which basically got our case thrown out. We had to refile. It was still wrong. They made us get what they said was crucial information on the case, which turned out to be unimportant to the judge. The experience doing business with them was so frustrating because calls were not returned, nor were emails. We didn't get copied on emails. The front desk guy, Rob couldn't care less what you needed. Every single time I called he'd ask for my number. For some reason, he needed to get this information about 20 times. Not that it mattered. Those calls were hardly ever returned. I doubt he walked the 10 feet required to get the note on the desk of whomever we were trying to reach. Indeed, the treatment we received, especially from Angie was like acid in an open wound. They made one of the worst times of our lives even worse. By the time we were fed up, we already had invested in the time with them and couldn't afford to pay another attorney to start the case. I have no idea what we paid for. Nothing was ever done. I believe that in the afterlife, Dan will have to do some accounting because if he lives to be 100, he still would have billed like he lived to about 800. I would definitely NOT recommend this law office unless you want your family law case to go from being a highly emotional and stressful situation to a horror story. There are a lot of attorney jokes that go around. Dealing with this group makes me appreciate the most vicious ones.