Tara Kilby

She helped me with my divorce (started March and was final in May of 2024). A standard and easy default divorce with me keeping custody of my daughter. She was unresponsive, rude and short with me. She told me that someone in her office had passed away, and she was taking on their work and was busy.... I dismissed her attitude and the delay in all communication because I understood that was probably an emotional and stressful time for her... but it was for me too as I was trying to get me and my daughter out of an abusive marriage, and I wished she understood that. The divorce was final as a default divorce. Well, it turned out that Tara never filed the parenting plan with the courts after it was final, so only five months after the divorce, my ex remarried and his new woman decided that even though he wanted nothing to do with our daughter and hadn't taken care of her a single day of her life, that she wanted our daughter. Well, since there was no parenting plan with the courts because of Tara's lack of attention to my case, he did what his new wife wanted and took me back to court to demand custody. I have now been back and forth in family court for 7 months, only just now having my final hearing and racked up over $25k in legal debt with a new lawyer because Tara failed to file the parenting plan the first time.

My spouse engaged Tara to file our divorce. We had already been physically separated for 1.5 yrs and were successfully co-parenting under terms that we had documented in a decree (we handed her a completed consent decree and asked her to shepherd the process). She described the expedited summary cons...ent decree process in Maricopa County which we all agreed was appropriate. Then, we get a petition from her office. It doesn’t reflect any of the terms we talked about, and I now think was just copied and pasted from a boilerplate (there were irrelevant sections around splitting child care costs but we have older teenage kids; ages were wrong, the terms were largely court defaults). My ex emailed and asked them to change it. They gave him some b.s. about this being part of the process to file default terms but we’re doing the consent process so it doesn’t matter. Then . . . They filed a default. So . . . What could’ve been a 60 day process for $350 in court fees + 1/2 of the $3,500 retainer; has now turned into a situation where we have hundreds of extra court fees; plus retaining additional counsel to file responses that weren’t necessary. We trusted them to follow the process they described. I’m going to guess that it’s just incompetence - too many clients, poor systems, bad training etc.