Elena Jill Eisenberg

Parents beware!! I wish someone would have warned me. This was hands down the worst experience I’ve had with an attorney - it was a nightmare. I wish I didn't wait as long as I did to stop using her services - she seemed so nice that I gave her the benefit of doubt. I hope you can learn from my mis...take. Excessive and predatory billing, unorganized, forgetful, and actually made our situation worse than before I hired her. I hired her to attend an IEP meeting. $3600 later, not only did she not do what she said she would do, but she blamed the excessive billing on me. I’ve worked with several other lawyers for custody and educational matters – none of them conducted themselves like she did – they were transparent, organized, well informed, consulted me step by step, and professional. She billed me $1500 per month for primarily emails and phone calls. The most common phrase from her was “I’m not sure where I saved this document”. She was extremely unorganized, seemed to struggle to know what the case was about, charged me $400 to review the former IEPs and then couldn’t remember where she saved them nor could recall the details of the documents, she couldn’t remember our conversations, we would agree on one thing, and she would do another. After I expressed concern with how much she billed the 2nd month she told me how to make the retainer last and then did work without consulting me and charged me $1500+ using up the retainer-doing the opposite of what she told me she was going to do. Even after I asked her to stop doing work for me she continued to try to bill me!! She repeatedly asked me for clarification on the case and documents or asked me to respond to inflammatory district emails and then charged me for the conversations. She left us without representation when we needed it most because she went through the retainer before she finished the work and then wanted me to pay her an additional $1200 to prepare and attend the IEP meeting, which is what I hired her to do. Now I have to hire someone to do the work I hired her to do. Save your money, save your sanity, save your child, DO NOT PUT YOUR TRUST IN THIS ATTORNEY.

Elena is an experienced and effective attorney who will help you resolve your case in a timely manner. My family and I felt that our son's high school was not effectively administering his IDEA/Section 504 education plan, and we retained Elena to assist us with this process. Elena's advice and plan... of action allowed us to quickly resolve our issues with our son's high school. I really appreciated her patience, expertise and the depth of her knowledge. I also really appreciated that she knew that our case could likely be resolved fairly easily, and so she outlined a plan that put us as parents 'in the driver's seat' - which in addition to giving my son the opportunity to quickly access his much needed services, we were able to do so in a manner that was cognizant of our fiscal restraints. Thank you Elena!

My oldest granddaughter has learning disabilities that require her to have an IEP. I tried to work directly with the teachers and school administration to address my concerns about the IEP not being adhered to by her teacher. At one point the executive director yelled at me and said the school had do...ne everything for my granddaughter and that perhaps it was time to “part ways”. I told the director my granddaughter wasn't the problem - it was the teacher who lacked the skills to teach, let alone teach a student with special needs. In charter schools, teachers do not have to have teaching degrees so this teacher literally did not know how to teach my granddaughter. After attempting to work within the school system, including the Charter School Institute, a friend of mine provided me Elena Eisenberg’s contact information. I reached out to Elena and explained to her the situation. Elena immediately went to work reviewing Kenndra’s IEP and developed a course of action that included advocating for Kenndra. As a result the following was accomplished: the school paid the full expense for a neuropsychological evaluation (serving to inform the development of Kenndra’s IEP), Elena participating in the IEP meeting and providing valuable input to ensure provision of accommodations and identification of meaningful metrics so that Kenndra’s IEP is now comprehensive, and finally, the transfer of Kenndra to another teacher who was better equipped to teach her. I highly recommend Elena Eisenberg to anyone encountering the same issues my granddaughter faced. Elena is very knowledgeable about education law and will be an advocate for your child!

We hired her after explaining in detail what was going on with our son as we wanted to be fully up front and what we intended to accomplish and we wanted to know "her plan" to decide if she understood and supported fully our son's position. As we have used reputable attorneys in the past, we had a... fairly good idea of what the process should look like to address discrimination and IEP violations. She stated in the initial call and in a second call that she move to due process if she could not get the school to follow his IEP as we had a "strong" case but $7500 later, not even an IEP meeting has been set up and our son seems to be in no better position than the day we hired her. When we asked her when she would be filing the due process as discussed, she resigned and stated she would "discount" some fees she charged and return some of our money. She didn't return many emails timely and even seemed to forget what she was supposed to be working on - but would bill us for reminding her, or course, when we would call her to ask her "the plan" as we were very concerned she wasn't diligently working on our case. When we asked her to talk about the bill in writing several times (for an obvious lack of any meaningful progress) and that we found items questionable on the bill, she did not respond. She would tell us how busy she was all the time on another case and ask us to 'remind her again' where we were at on our case (and then bill us for reminding her of course). For $7500 you would at least think she would have gone to ONE IEP meeting or filed a due process, right? We would definitely not recommend her. .