Celeste Evening Star Donnelly Miller

Celeste worked with me to navigate a revised parenting plan and resolve child support/visitation issues. She has an income based payment scale which made it very manageable for a single mom of two. She was available to meet in person but I was able to do the vast majority of business via phone and em...ail, which made things really easy. There were times I handed things on my own and times I needed a lot of advice and she was available to take phone calls and walk me through the process. She was very knowledge about how to handle custody issues when the other party is out of state and was very good about explaining the wording of the documents and what kind of language we needed to use in order to protect my kids best interest. If you are looking for someone to work with who understands Washington law and is a great communicator, I highly recommend her!

Celeste was recommended to me by a family friend and I couldn't be more grateful! I hired her for my divorce and child custody case and she was so quick and thorough to meet tight deadlines. I had hired a different attorney that I ended up replacing with Celeste because he was not communicating with ...me nor was he doing much of anything and time was running out. She made sure to explain everything in a way that I would understand and she listened and communicated with me about every detail. I am beyond happy with the outcome and the process!

Celeste is a passionate and driven individual. She holds many personal moral beliefs that are driving forces for her. She is one of the few family law attorneys that proceeds with what she truly believes is the best interest of the kids. Sometimes though in my opinion what she believed was in the bes...t interest of the kids was not what I believed was in the best interest of my kid. For the most part her conviction was commendable but in our case it hurt us several times over in unnecessary motions, additional lawyer time for these motions and refusal to file the correct motions to have needs heard because she did not believe it should be filed. In our case we knew a modification was necessary but she would not file one and instead would only agree to file a motion to clarify & contempt to a poorly written agreed pp plan from the opposite side. In the end the commissioner ruled as we suspected that a modify needed to be filed and she would not rule to clarify on an agreed plan. Because our attorney would not file the modify in the first place as we wanted and would only file the clarify/contempt we wasted 2500 dollars that could/should have gone towards the appropriate filing of a modify. Were now sitting with a large bill and no resolution as the commissioner refused to rule. To make matters worse the opposing party cross motioned our responses and one of them was a contempt for a matter Our lawyer advised us to do- On the positive side though there were many times she adjusted the bill and gave more time then she billed for. Had she filed what we wanted her billing was extremely fair, her motion drafting is exceptional, and she truly wants what is best for the kids but if your view of whats best is different than hers in my opinion she is hard pressed to compromise on representing your beliefs rather than hers. On the not so great side- her courtroom presence is still pretty green, she went over courtroom time, was difficult to reach except in email form and costed me a lot of money for the wrong motions filed. I think this attorney is great for consulting, reviewing documents, etc but her courtroom presence needs a lot more practice. We put up with more than we should have due to cost and this attorney being the best we could afford. In the end though the fact that we settled on a lower cost attorney hurt us more than helped because were stuck with a poorly written pp plan that we agreed to to save cost that sets the law of the case. This pp plan will hurt my family for years to come and should never have been agreed to as it was signifigantly less than what our casa recommended. To undo the damage will cost us thousands-a modification is in our future and we will be looking for someone different that better meets our families needs.