Lynn Michele Chaney Sevey

This attorney is a very nice woman. She was too nice and appeared to have issues with confrontation, especially when dealing with the schools attorney. She couldn't stand up to their attorney and clearly lacked the schools respect which was reflected in their willingness to work with us, but she ta...lked a good game privately with us as parents and we hoped for the best. Most questions we asked she had to get back to us on. She withheld time sensitive documents for weeks and billed us $36K for two IEP meetings, a simple notification of appeal filing and records review over the course of two months. $36K for two months. We didn't spend that much on six months with our previous attorney and he attended a four day trial, three IEP meetings and did full document reviews. The IEP meetings Lynn atteneded I had to do all the talking with the schools attorney Lynn sat there and watched saying very little. She did give us a 50% discount, but if we win the appeal she will bill the whole amount even though she contributed nothing that helped us. While she's been an attorney for several years, three here in California it's clear that she's new to special education law. We found her to be out of her league with the attorney's districts hire here in Sacramento and found that her performance significantly hurt our special needs student. We have been recommended by our current attorney to sue for malpractice. We can't recommend this nice lady because she failed to delivery any favorable results and now we owe her $18K for hurting our chances. Our current attorney has been able to clean up much of the damage, but we have lost huge amounts of potential money in damages that can't be recovered. The purpose of this posting is to say that as parents we have such limited funds. The school districts have huge pockets and have been successful in making these types of cases go away by just financially bleeding parents. It's important to choose an attorney who understands this and works quickly and effectively to get your student what they need while leaving his college fund in tact.