I had an issue where I needed to have a court hearing, I hired lawyer X to take care of my case. When we met lawyer X in November, we gave him a $2,500 retainer and told him our time line to finish this case - no exceptions. We signed a generic contract that listed his hourly rates, etc.
In January, lawyer X had still done nothing, and wanted to know what the big rush was. When we asked him to remember our time line (ie, we are moving out of state over the summer and need the issue finalized prior to that), he then, without asking or telling us, assigned us to lawyer Z.
Lawyer Z filed our case, but left the firm at the end of February. When lawyer X took our case again, he requested an extension for the trial date from the court - again, he told us he did this, he did not consult with us, after the fact he told us that he had been too busy to file something in order to get the defenses evidence prior to court. At that point, he told us our trial date was moved from May to what he said would be "the 3rd week of June." We were moving at the end of July, so that seemed okay.
However, yesterday has been the first time we've heard from lawyer X at all, in which his secretary left us a "call me back" message that we haven't been able to respond to due to his office hours. We are set to move in two weeks, the lawyer is obviously ignored our time line, drug his feet, and not done his job very well up to now. We will be doing a military move, so we cannot return for a later court date after we move - he was aware of this.
I also feel that he's padded his services to charge us more. For example, we were charged for lawyer Z to review our case, and even though he did nothing other than file the case, lawyer X re-charged us to review our file when he took the case back. Giving us a lawyer in January who left the firm in February seems like a con to use up the retainer. We were also charged for our FREE initial consultation!
So my question is, since lawyer X has not done his job in our time line, and in fact stalled and hindered our case making it impossible to complete now, is he still entitled to get paid for the charges he's billing us for after the retainer was polished off? He was contracted by the hour, but we hired him to get a job done in a specific time frame that he did not honor, and I feel like we've been coned.
To clarify the next to last paragraph, the charges for the 2 lawyers to review our case back-and-forth was $800, which is why it infuriates me to be assigned and then reassigned like this.
In January, lawyer X had still done nothing, and wanted to know what the big rush was. When we asked him to remember our time line (ie, we are moving out of state over the summer and need the issue finalized prior to that), he then, without asking or telling us, assigned us to lawyer Z.
Lawyer Z filed our case, but left the firm at the end of February. When lawyer X took our case again, he requested an extension for the trial date from the court - again, he told us he did this, he did not consult with us, after the fact he told us that he had been too busy to file something in order to get the defenses evidence prior to court. At that point, he told us our trial date was moved from May to what he said would be "the 3rd week of June." We were moving at the end of July, so that seemed okay.
However, yesterday has been the first time we've heard from lawyer X at all, in which his secretary left us a "call me back" message that we haven't been able to respond to due to his office hours. We are set to move in two weeks, the lawyer is obviously ignored our time line, drug his feet, and not done his job very well up to now. We will be doing a military move, so we cannot return for a later court date after we move - he was aware of this.
I also feel that he's padded his services to charge us more. For example, we were charged for lawyer Z to review our case, and even though he did nothing other than file the case, lawyer X re-charged us to review our file when he took the case back. Giving us a lawyer in January who left the firm in February seems like a con to use up the retainer. We were also charged for our FREE initial consultation!
So my question is, since lawyer X has not done his job in our time line, and in fact stalled and hindered our case making it impossible to complete now, is he still entitled to get paid for the charges he's billing us for after the retainer was polished off? He was contracted by the hour, but we hired him to get a job done in a specific time frame that he did not honor, and I feel like we've been coned.
To clarify the next to last paragraph, the charges for the 2 lawyers to review our case back-and-forth was $800, which is why it infuriates me to be assigned and then reassigned like this.