Hiring Mariah Mudgett was a tragedy for our family. Over the course of two years she took a totally winnable custody modification case and destroyed it. All of her legal advice was wrong. Her understanding of the law and statues and their application was wrong. Her strategy for winning at trial was a...mateurish and absurd.
She never even attempted to make reasonable objections at trial even after saying she was planning to “out lawyer” the other side. I gave her copious admissible evidence to work with. She couldn’t handle it. I gave her everything admissible to impeach the credibility of the other side. She didn’t use it even after I spent two years telling her how important it was and we lost because of her inability to show the evidence.
I felt totally unprepared the day we started trial. Her trial preparation was so sloppy it had to be done twice and I was charged twice. In the end she ran copies of the evidence through the copy machines without even noticing that the copies she sent to the judge could not be read clearly anymore and we went to trial that way.
When she didn’t know how to do something she had to ask for help from other attorneys and they charged me thousands of dollars for those attorney's input. Her fees went more than $30,000 over the original, estimated cost of the matter. In the end, her losses in our case combined with fees are well over 100K and counting. At no point did she get any positive results.
When her mistakes caught up with her and her law firm she tried to withdraw from the case in the midst of the case still going and then she tried not to tell me she was doing that. One day without warning, I got an email from her assistant with a motion to withdraw. It sighted the reason for withdraw was that the law firm was having an ethical conflict in representing me but she had never even spoken to me about that. I was left totally unrepresented for 3 weeks until the judge ordered her back and she never once tried to explain. Later I found out that they were trying to get out of paying money to a reference judge in our case so they quit without even telling me which is unethical.
Mariah’s demeanor in court is so flat that it was hard to tell that she even cared about the case. It was embarrassing to be represented that way. She appeared passionless throughout the trial. The other attorney who has a terrible reputation for sloppy work and did not do a good job at trial was still able to walk all over us and dominate the entire matter for two years. All Mariah did most of the time was shrug.
She talked tough in the initial consultation but never got tough after that. She let total lies become public record even though I gave her all the evidence she needed to get in front of those lies. I told her what was going to happen. She let it happen.
After the judge ordered her back to the case she got passive aggressive and did an even worse job. I had no money at that point to retain a new attorney.
Mariah Mudgett bankrupted me. I had to file chapter 13 after her continuous losses. All of her mistakes were used against me as reasoning to rule against me and Mariah never spoke up. I almost lost my house and I’ll be in bankruptcy for the next 5 years.
Custody of my kids was given to an abusive parent. My daughter started talking about killing herself. It's a traumatic mess everyday. We have 9 more years to live like this. My kids will be grown up when it’s over.
In the end, Mariah had evidence of judicial misconduct in our case but she withheld it from me and then went out of her way to lie to me about it afterward. Mariah cares more about judges liking her than she does about representing her clients real interests. She burned us without regard for how it would hurt me or my kids. The worst part is that this all happened after she told me that she became a lawyer to “change the system.” She represents the law firms that profit grossly off of families in crisis.
