Classless Lawyers

[BFritz21]

(04-28-2016, 07:41 AM)xxlt Wrote: Yeah, dude, family or not you are entitled to competent representation by your lawyer.

I mean, if your mom's cousin married a plumber and he charged you $300 to fix your toilet and it wasn't working and you had a leaking toilet and water and poo and pee all over your bathroom floor would you say, "Well, I can't be mad at family. I just have to live with this mess..." ? I hope not. So, if you hire someone to do a job and they do it poorly, you are entitled to be pissed off and do something about it.

Now, every person who loses a case or doesn't win as big as they want to didn't necessarily have a bad lawyer. But, it sure sounds like there was some shady stuff here: asking people to lie about the caretaker, taking a fee that every other lawyer said was not a fee they would charge, etc.

There are some lawyers who would never admit another lawyer messed up, but others who will admit it. I think it is worth your time to talk to another attorney (or two) and ask them if they think your case was handled properly. If it was not, you may be entitled to recover fees you paid to your lawyer if he screwed up and if he really screwed up he might be sanctioned by the bar association. Now, he is family, so you would have to ask, "Is it right to let a lousy lawyer keep screwing clients because he is family or is it right to stand up and protect other people from getting screwed like I did?" And, you might be entitled to have your new and competent counsel re-open the civil case(s) and get the outcome(s) you should have.

Good luck.

The lawyer asking people to lie was the cemetery's lawyer, not ours.

(04-28-2016, 07:44 AM)xxlt Wrote: Oh, and since there was a lot of publicity about your accident I don't think it would be too hard to find out who the lawyer(s) were but if you don't want to say that is fine. I just wondered if you could say - who was the first guy who died and who was the second guy? It sounds like they both made some mistakes, and like I said, if your counsel messed up you could be entitled to get a new case/trial.

First guy for them was named Denny (Dennis, I guess) VonSomething (I think, but it's been so long that I'm not even sure anymore) and I'm not even sure who the second guy was.

(04-28-2016, 09:47 AM)Au165 Wrote: Maybe, your case isn't as iron clad as you think it is. Just a crazy thought.

Trust me, it was.  

(04-28-2016, 10:55 AM)Benton Wrote: No you don't have a right to be mad.

He should get paid for working. You mention the amount, but not what percentage of the settlement. If its half, yeah that's crappy. If its standard, then no.

As far as the rest, it sounds like something is off. But at the end of the day, a lawyer is just there to assist you. Either someone miscommunicated with him, or someone should have fired him earlier for going against their wishes.

He didn't do any work for that, though!  He just found the clause in our insurance!

(04-28-2016, 11:27 AM)Au165 Wrote: ....basically everything Fred said.

The other attorneys said that they wouldn't even charge a percentage because it was ours anyways, just negotiating a price, which I'm not even sure how much needed to be done.

Look into it and see that this judge, Gregory Bartlett, has a history of it.  He needed an excuse so it wouldn't raise any red flags.  Case-in-point: his reasoning for saying the driver's parents weren't at fault were because they "couldn't foresee that the driver would drink and drive in the cemetery," even though he had drank before in the cemetery and driven with his father, because another teen's parents couldn't foresee that he would have brought a gun to school and killed a bunch of classmates.  You want to talk about delusional?  Explain how those two situations are related.

I know what the jury based the ruling on because they told the judge after the trial.  The ruling was incorrect because it was that we could have wrecked anywhere, when we only wrecked in the cemetery because he was speeding, which he only did because there were no other cars, traffic laws, or chances of being caught because cops weren't allowed back there, and not to mention that nowhere else would have had streets as narrow, dark, or windy as the cemetery, not to mention nothing like a headstone that we could clip.  The cemetery was also only a hundred yards from his neighborhood on a straight highway, so no chance or wrecking there, either.  Thanks, call me out more.

I called out my lawyer after the trial.

See above as to why I just proved it.  You can't compare two completely unrelated events just because you'd like to make the outcome the same.  Please, argue that.

(04-28-2016, 11:28 AM)Bengalzona Wrote: Hmmm....

A Brad thread with six replies from Fred already....

Be careful how you respond to each other, gentlemen:


Keep the discourse civil and non-personal.

I'm not even responding to him, but the fact that you even have to say that before I responded speaks volumes to how he responded, yet I'd still be the one punished.