The following can be read at www.maxeyiplaw-clientabuse.com
Hi, my name is Neal and I was a client of the Brittany Maxey IP Law Offices between October and December. I am writing this after having retained Stephen Lewellyn of Maxey IP law to advise me, as a new independent inventor
seeking protection for my designs during the investment seeking process, of the nature and reality of intellectual property protection. I was advised that the provisional application I was considering (due to financial constraints) would take three months to complete, the first of which would constitute a preliminary patent search; It was not until
after the patent search was complete that I was informed by Stephen Lewellyn that the enforcement of even a fully granted patent would take in the range of one to two million dollars to litigate, making patent protection inaccessible to all but the wealthiest.
After having been mislead by Stephen Lewellyn into signing a representation contract with Maxey IP Law firm and paying the highly unusual non-refundable retainer fee, I brought forth a Notice of Dispute as per our contract, to be responded to in 10 business days.
A month passed after providing written notice and I received nothing in return, so I emailed Brittany Maxey about this and had a teleconference later that week with her and Stephen. As it turned out they had received my notice but didn't bother to respond, so seeking resolution I requested that since I could not afford patent protection that she at least help me in some way by connecting me with people with investment experience, to which I was given a terse reply to the effect of no. Exhausting diplomatic options, I offered to settle it for the return of my retainer and compensation for the month that I had been misled, but she refused, saying that she did not believe that her firm misled me or that patent protection was only accessible to the rich. Unfortunately after much discussion surrounding the issue of how patents help someone who can't afford to enforce them, she could not provide an answer. Furthermore when asked why her firm breached the contract that they misled me into signing, she replied that the "disputes" only refer to
disputes about the contract itself, though upon further review this was never defined.
Although the bar for lawyer conduct may not be set very high I believe that these acts were unwarranted and constitute egregious recklessness on their part if not outright abuse. I hope that my story may serve as a fair warning to anyone who is performing due diligence and wishes to know the character of their counsel.
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