Tara Kilby

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.