Tom Brasier

Recently, my old settlement had to be reopened and I hired a lawyer. What I learned from this new attorney is that I had learned very little from my first round with Mr Brasier years ago. When working with him he would get impatient when I had questions. He even left me a frustrated and unprofessi...onal message about not having reloaded my retainer yet when I actually had (he just hadn’t communicated with his secretary). Years later, I’m finding out that my settlement is poorly written, a result of both attorneys involved, with ambiguities in the language that are creating problems for me and costing me more money. I’m learning from my current attorney about rights I’ve had all along regarding custody, tax credits, and child support that Tom never informed me of. My current attorney cares about informing me of my rights and giving me the information I need to make good choices. When I recently called Mr Brasier to ask a question about my settlement, he joked that he never remembers his clients. While this may be true, it certainly doesn’t seem like something worth saying out loud.

On March 17th I received a call from Tom telling me, in summary, that I had paid enough for what I hired him to do and he was going to return the balance of my retainer and complete the rest of the work as a courtesy. I was shocked, impressed and relieved! at the end of the conversation he added in "...oh by the way, if you wouldn't mind, my wife says my avvo could use a little help". I readily agreed but when I saw the older reviews I decided to wait to see how far he would go "as a courtesy" and fill out the review based on the whole experience. so here it is. I hired Tom in July of 2014 for 1)an uncontested divorce 2)to have my child support case moved to Oregon and 3) modify the support amount since I was currently a total of $200 a month to raise my 2 children. According to our initial consultation the divorce portion should have been around 1k and as long as nothing was disputed or contested my initial $2500 retainer should cover the divorce and support case. Directly from an email from him - 4. Honestly the modification proceeding will be time consuming. I expect that process will cost about $1,500, possibly more if he objects to it. I explained the logistics during our first meeting. Who lived where, who moved when etc. If he didn't know what was involved in completing what I hired him to do then that should have been disclosed in our first meeting. I expect to pay for knowledge and experience not to have someone try to figure out what to do, try a bunch of options and have none of them work. I gave Tom a total of $4000. My divorce was completed timely with no troubles so according to his first estimate $1000. He returned a whopping $212 for my remaining retainer. So basically I paid him $2800 to accomplish nothing on my support/modification. That's also after catching a $215 double bill one month. His billings don't make sense. I was charged for both him and his assistant to prepare an affidavit and meet with me on the same day. $86 to review an affidavit that they prepared I just signed and returned. If you're resending and resending the same docs over and over I don't think it should cost more than your initial draft of the documents and sending them in the first place. It goes on and on. And the final outcome? from his last email - Oregon does not have a procedure to compel Nevada to accept the signed consent. Nevada seems to be refusing to accept the signed consent to transfer jurisdiction. Without Nevada's consent, we seem to be completely blocked from switching jurisdiction to Oregon. I can keep trying if you'd like to see if I can find someone more helpful in Nevada, but it seems you may be stuck with keeping child support in Nevada despite our best efforts. Also during all this the modification I filed myself with Nevada before hiring Tom went through and my support was increased to $200 a month for each child. So ultimately I was able to accomplish more myself and quicker. It's still a ridiculous amount of money to try to raise children on and it would have been nice to have someone fight for you.