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Review content:
Now that the dust has settled after my divorce, I finally have the opportunity to sit down and review my lawyer. My divorce was extremely high conflict, involved young children, and was in litigation for almost a year and a half.\r
I heard of Lou by word of mouth. Lou was the OPPOSING attorney in a close friend’s divorce. I consulted with three attorneys before choosing Lou. I chose him based on his price and his responses to the questions I asked. I knew my divorce was going to be high conflict, so I chose carefully. I wasn’t disappointed.\r
Here’s what I really liked about Lou:\r
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His retainer and run rate were reasonable and competitive.\r
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He was honest and fair with his billing. Attorneys are paid by the hour, so be prepared. Expect to pay for every phone call taken and every email read. If a phone call with him was roughly 20 minutes, I got billed for 20 minutes. If we met for an hour, I was billed for an hour. Nobody has perfect recall or walks around with a stopwatch around their neck, so you have to place some level of trust in your attorney to be honest. It also means the support staff needs to be organized so the billing is accurate. I spot checked many times along the way to make sure everything was on the up-and-up, and I never found any irregularities whatsoever. If anything, he tended to cut me some slack here and there if it was just a quick phone call.\r
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He’s very experienced. Nobody has a crystal ball, but he was pretty accurate when predicting the outcome of many specific key events.\r
He didn’t strike me as greedy. Again, this goes back to the honesty thing. You hear all sorts of horror stories about attorneys bleeding their clients dry because they can. While I certainly did my share of bleeding, he wasn’t ruthless. He was fair.\r
He’s got a really good supporting team. The office admins and paralegals were top notch.\r
Additional detail: As mentioned above, my divorce was extremely high conflict with young children involved. I had every allegation thrown at me from domestic violence to substance abuse, none of which were even remotely true. It was extremely upsetting. I was under constant and relentless legal attack. My ex-wife was demanding exclusive custody of our children; that my parenting time be limited to 8 hours of supervised visitation per month; that I pay her full attorney’s fees; and a litany of other completely unreasonable demands for spousal maintenance and child support using inflated numbers for my salary. My case ended up going to trial.\r
At certain times during the process I thought Lou was being too tepid in his response, but in the long run it was the correct strategy. He calmly responded to the accusations one-by-one. In the end, my ex’s wildly irrational accusations became her ultimate undoing. Make no mistake; we had to go through a great deal of effort and process to clear my name. In the beginning, things looked very bleak. By the end, I wound up with 50/50 custody of my children and spousal maintenance that was more in line with reality. Child support is largely determined by the state using a set of formulas, so your attorney really doesn’t have much to do with that. Either way, I was extremely pleased with the outcome. My ex’s final attempt to extort me for her attorney’s costs resulted in a minimal judgment in her favor. This was somewhat expected due to the discrepancy between incomes.\r
Given what was at stake and the craziness of what I was dealing with, things could have gone much, much worse had I not had good, competent legal representation. I was so relieved when I read the final ruling and realized it was finally over. I would definitely recommend Lou to anyone and will definitely be using him for any of my future family-law needs. Setting up a Will / Trust is next on my list.\r
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