I hired Elizabeth Kuhn of Hait & Eichelzer, Attorneys-at-Law to represent me in a divorce case. At my first meeting with her I told her that I thought my husband and I would be able to come to an agreement regarding the division of our property, without a messy court case. She said that it would cost around $1,500 if it didn't go to court.
I paid her a $1,500 retainer and she said that I would be sent a statement each month showing how much had been used and what it had been used for.
The first statement I received included a charge of $25.00 for her sending me a thank you letter for retaining her services! Unbelievable! She charged me $770.00 to draft the papers that would be filed with the court and served on my husband.
The papers were a joke! They were filled with errors.in one place, they didn't even have the correct name of my husband. It was obvious they were fill in the blank and you would think for $770.00 they could have filled in the blanks correctly.
The papers she had served to my husband were only intended to make him angry and want to go out and hire an attorney so we could both spend thousands of dollars on attorney fees. One of the requests she made to him was "For all purchases of pornagraphic material purchased by you during the term of the marriage, please list the item purchased, date of purchase, from whom purchase was made and the amount of the purchase."
After I called her and expressed my disappointment regarding the errors and the tone of the letter to my husband, she reduced the charges to $595.00. I also told her that my husband was working out of state and we were trying to come to an agreement on the settlement. I advised her that I would not call or e-mail her to give her an update, because each time I e-mailed her, it cost me $39.00 for her to read it and it cost $58.50 to talk to her on the phone. She agreed to put it on hold until she heard from me. At this time, she had spent $1,099.00 of the $1,500.00 retainer I had paid.
Several months passed and my husband and I had pretty much agreed on everything and set up a meeting with her at her office. During this meeting when we were discussing the cost of my health insurance, which my husband had already agreed to pay for the first year after the divorce, she pointed out to him that I would have to go under Cobra and it would be very expensive. She then looked at me (her client) and asked me if I would be willing to pay for half of it. At one point during the meeting, she actually openly flirted with my husband.
Bottom line is, we went to her office with an agreement and left her office with issues unresolved. Immediately after this my husband took another job out of state and I didn't see or talk to him for months at a time. I again told her we would try to work it out and let her know when we reached an agreement.
Several months passed and the next thing I know, I receive a copy of a motion she filed with the court stating her intention to withdraw from the case.
I e-mailed her and asked her why and she said it was because I hadn't paid my bill. I said what bill... You have $1,500 of my money and according to the last statement I received which was 5 monthys ago, you had used $1,099.00 of it. What about the other $401.00? She responded that I was wrong. The $1,500 I paid her as a retainer was to be held and paid towards my final bill. I was expected to pay the $1,099.00 if I wanted her to stay on the case.
This was completely different from the way she explained it to me in our initial meeting. I didn't have $1,099.00 more to pay her and so she removed herself from the case, and kept the rest of my money.
People like her are the reason why attorneys have such a bad reputation. Her only interest in my case was in hopes that it would be a long drawn out battle and she would suck about $10,000 more out of me before it was over. When she realized that she wasn't going to make any more money on me, she ditched me as a client and kept my $1,500.00.
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