The law offices of J Michael Kelly were in my employ—though you'd have thought it was the other way round—for roughly five months.in the end, after being promised all sorts of action, I wound up exactly where I started—well, not exactly. No one could waste five months, receive bills of more than $16,000, and be anywhere but worse off than before. What follows is a brief description of my time with the Kelly firm.
During my five months with the Kelly firm I had exactly two meetings with attorneys, and both of them occurred only after I wrote the company asking what was going on. The first meeting, which occurred a week or so after I hired him, was with Michael Kelly. During the meeting, Mr. Kelly spent an hour ourlining an "Action Plan." Item #1 on the plan was to appoint Matthew Rich as my day-to-day attorney. The number of times I was contacted by or otherwise had any sort of communications from Mr. Rich during the entire five months—ZERO. Other items on the "Action Plan" list: depose my wife, retain a private investigator to confirm her whereabouts and living conditions (she had long ago moved out of state), research spousal abandonment consequences (my wife abandoned the household), change the title of residence—i.E., remove "joint tenancy, with rights of suvivorship" from title, conduct a vocational evaluation of my wife (no one ever asked me about my wife's educational or work experience—she had a university degree and had worked several jobs), etc. The number of so-called "action" items listed here that were done—ZERO.
Other things that had to be done before the Mandatory Settlement Conference and Trial: have my pension, IRA, and 457 Deferred Compensation Plan—my primary sources of income—evaluated. Were these things done? No. Apparently Kelly (or some other attorney from his office—?) intended to walk into the MSC and Trial without any idea of what kind of numbers we were dealing with.
Finally, several months and several letters to Mr. Kelly into the case, and a little more than two weeks before a Mandatory Settlement Conference, I sent an e-mail to Mr. Rich asking what on earth was going on. Without responding, Mr. Rich apparently forwarded my e-mail to another attorney, Mitchell Sperling. A few days later, now nearly four months after hiring the firm, Mr. Sperling called to set up an appointment.
The meeting with Mr. Sperling lasted about an hour. During the meeting Mr. Sperling took several phone calls, including one from his wife, spending several minutes on the phone. Finally off the phone, Mr. Sperling said he and his wife were also seeking a divorce. He then went on for several minutes about women, mostly about how expensive they are both during and after marriage.
When I was finally able to slip in a comment, I told Mr. Sperling that I needed to sell the condo (community property) in which I lived and move to the Midwest. Mr. Sperling then spent most of the rest of the meeting talking about his experiences in the Midwest. At most, five-ten minutes of the hour long meeting was spent discussing the case—and most of that time involved me telling Mr. Sperling and his assistant, who also attended the meeting, that certain documents—a deed, for example—could be found in the case file. Disturbing, to say the least, given that over the previous four months I had been charged thousands of dollars for scanning documents and reviewing files—but then, as the bill for the meeting stated, to Mr. Sperling and his assistant, Mr. Jonas, it was a "new" case. Ridiculous, really—four months and thousands of dollars in bills, and I was dealing with and an attorney who considered my case a "new" case! Even more ridiculous, however, is that I never heard from Mr. Sperling again. Mr. Jonas did call a couple of times asking me to review a draft of the Mandatory Settlement Conference Brief. I did, after which Mr. Jonas proceeded, without explanation, to ignor several of my comments. I also filled out and Income and Expense Delcaration that Mr. Jonas was supposed to type up and send off. That was the last I saw of that. As far as I can tell, it was never sent. There is no trace of it in the case file.
Two days before the Mandatory Settlement Conference, having heard not a another word from anyone, I sent an e-mail to Mr. Sperling asking what was going on and what his strategy for the MSC was. As indicated above, I received no response.
Late that Friday afternoon, with the MSC on Monday morning, I received a call from another person I'd never heard of, Mike Rodriguez. He said my wife's MSC brief was just coming off the FAX machine, was twenty some pages long, and that there was no way to digest and be able to respond to the many accusations contained therein by Monday morning. The MSC and Trial, he said, would have to be continued. It was clear from what Mr. Rodriguez said that everyone was surprised by my wife's MSC brief, and not just because it arrived days after it was supposed to.
My first thoughts at that point: had they deposed my wife (with lots of input from me), hired the PI, conducted the vocational evaluation (and maybe a psychological one too), asked my wife to fill in the holes in her discovery documents, talked to me (or my son) about the case, including any thoughts we might have as to my wife's state of mind and what her concerns were likely to be—i.E., had they done the job, done the things they said they were going to do... Well, there would have been few surprises and no need for a continuance. But no... Five months and thousands of dollars later, and it's back to square one. I'm still trying to figure out what all the bills were for—things that were talked about a lot in in-house staff meetings or discussions, but never done? Scanning documents and reviewing files that no one I ever talked to seemed to know anything about? Preparing an "Action Plan" that wasn't followed?
My second thoughts: five more months of opportunities to bill for things hard to contest, but more than likely never done.
A few last comments. About the only form of communication I received from the Kelly firm came in the form of bills. That's also how I got what little information I managed to get about what the Kelly people were doing—or not doing. No one sent me copies of documents or court dates or anything else, unless I asked—sometimes several times. I always had to keep and eye on the court case summaries on the internet to find out what was going on. I found out the MSC date and the trial date from the case summary on the interne, not from anyone in the Kelly office. They treat case documents as if they do not belong to the client, which they do. Providing them to the client should be automatic. There should be copy and labor costs, yes, but the client should not have to pay for phone calls asking (sometimes to the point of arguing) to be provided with documents or for visits to the office (as if a meeting is involved) to pick them up.
When I terminated the Kelly firm almost a month ago and picked up my case file, the file contained very little that it didn't contain when I delivered it to them five months before. That's because they also keep a computer file—and also, of course, because they did little over the five months to generate documents. They did not return the computer file with the case file. I had to ask for the computer file a couple of times. I was told it was a "reasonable request, " as if asking for a complete file pertaining to my own case could be otherwise. I finally picked up the CD yesterday. There isn't much on it, either.
All in all, the Kelly experience was one that I wouldn't wish on anyone.
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