Amanda Summer Husted

This attorney seems a nice and warm person at first. The strength I found in her practice was her good analytical skills when filing documents (I was the defendant in a divorce with child custody+support/spousal support). There were some omissions and errors that could easily be corrected if she had ...given me enough time to read through before signing them. Very poor time management practice with her clients. She is always in a rush and most court documents that I had to sign and submit were done for example around 9:00am when we needed to be in court for an audience at 10 am, giving me no other option than to sign the document. At times, I would receive some notices from the court that I was late in filing some documents and we would have to find a way to take care of it. Also, she never gave me advice on my rights, duties or even the case. Not being an American citizen, I was pretty much ignorant about the whole judicial system in the US and looking back two years after she defended me, I realize that she mainly took advantage of my naivety and ignorance to make me accept anything she wanted. She convinced me to go for a settlement in which I did not receive anything I asked for. First, she asked me to give up on the custody of our children, telling me that “custody is an empty crown” (Her words that I haven’t forgotten). Also, she allowed my parenting days to be reduced to 5 days a week (before the divorce, the other parent and myself had children one week on/one week off for a whole year and I wanted to maintain this routine whereas the other parent wanted more days for obvious financial reasons). The other parent and myself were both graduate students at the UO and I had debts on credit cards and required this common past debt to be shared equally. She did not address this and the divorce papers are strangely silent on this issue. Instead, she made me agree (on the court) to pay spousal support $1/month for 2 years and then a substantial amount after 2 years (for 3 years). I also discovered few days before the final judgment trial that the court had ordered me to pay the other parent’s health insurance. My attorney NEVER told me this and NEVER showed me any document. I confronted her and she said she did. I kept quiet for how would you argue with your attorney? Did she have another agenda? Hard not to believe so. During the settlement day, she told me the judge asked that I pay the past 8 months of the other spouse health coverage. As a GTF at the UO, adding a spouse to my coverage was $250 for three months. Amanda had all documentation. Normally, I should have paid less than $750 for the 8 months. However, when Ms Amanda wrote the final court order, she wrote $2000 for health insurance for 8 months. I would contact her and she would never reply to me. In court, I understood and told Ms Amanda that she was in no way defending me and I wanted to stop that “settlement” and go for a trial. She didn’t tell me I had any other option. Instead, she kept on putting me more pressure and scaring me with words such as: “You don’t want to go for a trial. They gonna throw mud at you, tell dirty things about you". The next attorney I saw and who read my divorce papers was just astonished at what she was reading and asked me why I accepted all that. I told her it is because I did not know I had a choice to say No. At the end of the settlement "trial", the last words she told me were: "Now, I understand this whole case was about money. She needed money". Strange confession for an attorney. But not too strange: Amanda is that type of attorney who thinks that her client is always telling lies while the other is always telling the truth. So, I had to continuously spend incredible energy trying to prove to my attorney that I was trustworthy.