Nicole L Deering

Nicole has joined a large firm and is very busy. I suspect that she is overloaded with too many cases. I hired her to handle my divorce in a fair and equitable fashion with my wife. She was often ill prepared and was using templates from other cases to cookie-cutter court submissions. I was direc...ted by her into a single session mediation marathon with a retired judge. Never agree to this. I was quite capable of making quick financial decisions however it was very inhumane for my dear spouse. My spouse was not ready for this level of pressure. I felt sorry for the trauma. In addition while I was reading lengthy documents that I had never seen before, I was paying billable hours for a minimum of two attorneys and a judge to watch me read. While the other party was reviewing our counter proposal, we were twittling our thumbs - more billable hours. Nicole never was able to obtain a counter proposal prior to the mediation however opposing counsel provide 15-20 pages of documents at the start of the mediation. Quite frankly I thought Nicole spent more time driving down my position than acting as an advocate. Throughout the process Nicole often put forward false deadlines for me to agree to positions in order to pressure me. In addition when I asked for the documents in MS Word so that I could compare the documents with previous versions, Nicole resisted. I spend hours - billable hours - explaining to her that in the mediation terms we had successfully negotiated that opposing counsel was required to provide documents in MS Word. She finally got the documents. Nicole is a nice person but she is just pushing cases through. She is more interested in bending her client into agreement than acting as a good client advocate. My most important advice is NOT to agree to a marathon mediation session. Break it up into several 1 hour sessions, where everyone can thoughtfully review the proposal - off the clock. Good luck