Complaint / Review
Phillip W. Harris - James D. Lia - Budget Legal Centers
Beware of legal services at Budget Legal Center

Consumers should be aware of any paralegal service that provides legal advice.

Budget Legal Center (BLC) in Los Alamitos, CA has advertised itself as a "legal center" for many years under the attorney section of the phone book, when, in fact, it was simply a legal document service or paralegal service masquerading as an attorney firm. Such tactics created ambiguity in the consumers mind about weather they were paying for legal advice or simply hiring a layman to provide legal documents.

Currently, the BLC website indicates they are a professional corporation ("Budget Legal Center PC"), thus assumedly owned and operated excusively by an attorney. The website claims they are "led by a team of attorneys" but never discloses the attorneys or owner by name.

Attorney James Lia claims to own "Budget Legal Systems, " as noted on the California Bar website, listing the same phone number as the number listed at the BLC website. However, BLC (or any similarly spelled names) isn't listed as a corporation under the California Dept of Corporations website. Perhaps Mr. Lia has simply failed to register his corporation (or it exists under another name).

My point is that Budget Legal Center is most likely still owned and controlled by Philip Harris, a non-attorney, who has run the business for many years. However, proving this is difficult without a financial audit of Mr. Lia and Mr. Harris to determine who controls the funds. Supposedly, all funds are controlled by Mr. Lia, an attorney, who then pays Phil Harris a salary to perform paralegal services under his supervision. If not, then be sure you are hiring attorney Lia (with the accompanying price tag!) and signing a contract exclusively with him to perform legal services.

To sum up: if you have a problem with BLC, remember that attorneys are held accountable by the California State Bar Association, but paralegal business owners are not. It should be clear weather you are contracting with a legitimate legal document service or an attorney. There should be NO ambiguity involved.

Good luck!