Noelle Therese Gaston

RUN AS FAST AND AS FAR AWAY FROM THIS LAW FIRM AS YOU CAN (Noelle Gaston & her husband Chris Biely)!!! I'm just trying to save you the extra money, time, and trouble we've been through. We hired Noelle Gaston, this law firm, December 2021 and paid $1500 up front for filing fees and publications. It w...as a simple probate case (1 house, all siblings in agreement, and my husband as administrator). We were going to buy the house off of the estate for appraised value as it was passed down generations (None of the siblings wanted to get rid of it.) Noelle made us hire a real estate agent, I found one, which we had to pay a percentage of the sale price to. The agent opened up the escrow and I already had my own lender, all 3 of which I worked closely with, several times a week. Financing fell through at the last minute. My husband called Noelle and told her the 4 siblings wanted to keep the house in the family, even if 3 of them needed to sign over their portion to him. She said that would be different from the CA regulated probate fee, my husband asked if she had a ballpark $, she said No, he told her "I'm not rich and I can't just willy nilly let you run away with hours." This is when it all started. On 12/27/2022 She backdated $2,585 of extraordinary fees and applied them to our case, even after a meeting we had where she said she hadn't done anything extraordinary yet, and before she did she would let us know. Some of these charges included reading emails she was just CC'd in as an FYI. When we contested the charges with her she said: this was a min charge, we could either pay the $2,585, or if we continued to contest it she would seek $4,180. When we told her we wanted the court to decide the extraordinary fees (I had several consults with other local and CA probate attorneys, who agreed these extraordinary fees were excessive), she refused to file the last court document of the probate. She then said communication had broken down between us and wanted us to voluntary sign to relieve her as counsel. We told her we just wanted to finish with her because it was almost done. She filed a motion to be relieved and charged us another $1,100 for filing it. I hired another local probate attorney to finish. He asked her for our remaining $466.89 of the fee we paid in the beginning to file the last step, she refused to give him OUR MONEY, so we had to pay another $500 filing fee and also additional fees for representation. Her extraordinary fees at this point were over $7,000. Court ordered mediation for the fees, we paid her $1966.89 in extraordinary fees, statutory fees, and the new lawyer’s fees because we just wanted to be done (after almost 2 years) with probate and try to move forward from the death of a loved one.

BE AWARE .....This attorney and the firm CS Biely are in this for the money. They are NOT experienced and their billing practices are questionable. She has been admonished by the family court judge on several occasions in my situation. They double and or triple bill for items and those of us that a...re not savvy in these situations can really get taken advantage of. I asked questions on numerous occasions that they could not or would not answer. My case should have been handled in a much different manner and was not - therefore costing me thousands of $$$. The judge had to order another attorney to fix the mess she had made of my case. Which cost me MORE $$$$. Just be aware.