Written: 2011/07/13 Posted: 2012/03/06
So it has been a difficult part of our lives thus far. Life should move forward. Ours hasn’t. We are working at that, but it has been difficult. We have had lots to deal with which may be finding a resolution in the near to us future. Or that is our hope. Although we have thought this many times before and yet here we are.
The positives:
A.) We have a new attorney! Thank you Dr. Gold, for finding us one when no one would take our messed up case. And he is AWESOME.. so far at least.. Ha! I really think he will prove to be as well!!
B.) We are doing our part to insure that the bad things done by our first attorney will not be done again by him to others cases.
C.) Our lawsuit against the insurance company (the man who pulled out in front of me 7 years ago) may finally be figured out. Not that it will help us at all because of our first attorney’s neglect…. but finished and over with will at least mean that we can turn our attention to something different.
Here is Part 1 of our story on the legal front. I don’t know how many parts there will be. Keep in mind this is not professional legal advise! This is just my uneducated except by the world of hard knocks advise. You really should talk to a competent attorney about these matters. It is a story, it is our story.
I worry about competency these days. I worry about professionals doing what they say they are going to do. Do you realize the amount of unprofessional professionals these days seems to be skyrocketing? It may be my feelings on this subject are a bit jaded.
I am going to take this opportunity to get some things off of my chest. Things that have been bothering me for years now and I have not really felt that I could say anything about them due to possible repercussions.
Now things are nearer to being resolved. Not resolved but action has been taken. There will be a resolution.
Keep in mind I don’t wish anyone harm, I am going to be sharing this merely to educate and inform about what has been going on in my/our lives.
I was in a car accident August 6, 2004 this was at a point in my life that after years of learning and trying and struggling, my Mary Kay business was really growing! I had finally learned how to be successful with it.
I am not going into a great amount of detail. Those who know me of course are welcome to ask for more details. But this will cover the generalities.
After this accident where a 90 year old person pulled out in front of my car…. Details can be found HERE. (this link will take you to my old blog site because some of the files didn’t transfer over to this one. )
(Older people and those with mitigating health conditions should be tested for driving every year in all areas, in my opinion.) Yes I realize that I would also be one of those people getting tested every year if this were the case. I think it is a good idea!
That being said… accidents happen. This one did. I was told I’d be better in a couple of weeks… so I just put my life on hold and no one really knew what happened to me. Four Weeks, Six Weeks, Six Months, Two Years…. Well if you’ve been following my blog, you will understand I never really got better.
I am now finally doing better than I have previously. Thanks to some powerful nutrition, the never giving up Dr. Gold, the super smart Dr. Nedrow, and the always diligent, P.A. Lynn. And other great professionals along the way.
However, there was always another component of this case, that I have not spoken about much. That was the legal side of things. At first I was just going to be better and get on with my life. So I didn’t get an attorney, I was just going to figure things out. I was on the verge of setting my life normal after years of struggling to learn how to manage my life and run a successful business that I could actually support myself with. ( Since this blog is about my life after the accident not before, so I am not going to further complicate things.)
Well after years of not getting better and also not being able to settle things with the 90+ year old man’s insurance, we hired an attorney. This attorney is one that I had met through other professionals and he had a good working relationships with them as I had been told.
At this point this is all a matter of public record. I am not going to share the who’s where’s and when’s just give you a brief understanding of what we have been fighting along with my health issues, money issues, settlement issues, we have had attorney issues.
These cases while I am not sure how long they typically last, 7 years is a hideous amount of time to pass before something like this is resolved. This series of posts is about attorney issues.
Let me start by saying I live in Nebraska. In Nebraska there is such an entity as is called The Council For Discipline. This entity is there to protect the general public from attorneys. In Nebraska, attorneys police themselves.
This entity assists the Nebraska Supreme Court in disciplining attorneys. This is one example of such actions. Barista’s
By the way I LOVED Barista’s! It was one of the most amazing places, I was devastated to learn of their closing and of their subsequent legal difficulties, which at the time I found out totally smeared the people who owned the company, when it turns out they had done their due diligence it was their attorney who hadn’t.
This is the story after the hearing about Barista’s.
So those of you who judge with out hearing both sides… let this be something that you take into consideration.
On a good note they have opened again at another location. However from the pictures it is NOTHING like the ambiance that the old location provided. I am sure though that they still have amazing coffee and service!
Our case is different, but similar in many ways. The Council for Discipline has suggested sanctions against our attorney.
This is a link to the Nebraska Supreme Court Ruling against Barista’s attorney…
I like this article regarding that case.. Just my thoughts..
Our case has been and as I understand it right now not an issue of note worthy or news worthyness. However, it is important to note that we have learned how to negotiate this process the hard way. Having never gone through law school, having no family members who work in the field of law, and no close friends that do either… we really did not know what we should expect from our attorney except for what you would see from a television show, and that information is I am sure not based completely on facts.
Our attorney was not one of those stereo typed ambulance chancing attorneys that the movies and television had all warned us about. I talked to a few of those but really never felt comfortable with the slickness that I perceived on their part. So we.. I chose someone whom I had heard good things about in a group I belonged to. He had even gotten Mary Kay from me for his wife as a gift.
I thought I was doing the right thing.
Now hindsight being 20/20 I have a totally different perspective.
This post will not go live until our public hearing has begun. At least that is my intention.
So I will share if you have had problems with an attorney in Nebraska here is where you start. This is not where you go if you are ANGRY because your feelings have been hurt. This is where you go if you have issues with your attorney that are contradictory to the duties they have committed to upholding in the State of Nebraska.
Here is where you can go to find out if your attorney has had disciplinary actions taken against them.
There is no other method of figuring out if the attorney you choose is competent to handle your case other than your attorney’s word for it other than the list above.
If I were to do this again, these are the questions I would ask before I hired an attorney.
1.) How many cases exactly like this have you handled.
a.) Of those cases what exactly was the result of each, and when were they.
2.) If you find this case to be different than the cases you have handled before, are you willing to get the proper education and peer support needed to competently handle my case to its most positive resolution?
3.) How do you handle it when you discover you are in over your head with a case?
4.) As our attorney, what type of communication should we expect to get from you?
a.) Will we receive regular updates from you even if nothing has transpired to keep us informed?
b.) If something happens with our case will you inform us of this in writing?
c.) Are you willing to educate us as to what we should expect and when as far as our case is concerned?
d.) Are you willing to deal with things in a timely manner. And what does a timely manner mean to you?
e.) Are you willing to communicate through the mail as well as email?
f.) Will you tell me in no uncertain terms what you need from me and when you need it by?
5.) Are you willing to put every effort into discovering all of the relevant facts in a timely manner?
6.) If expert witnesses are to be needed will you know that and know where to find them?
7.) Have you ever had clients go through depositions before? What is your level of experience with this?
8.) Have you ever had clients go to mediation before? What is your level of experience with this?
9.) Have you ever been in front of a judge before? How many times? How many cases?
10.) Has a judge ever filed injunctions or reprimands against you or your clients?
11.) Have you ever forgotten to show up for court dates?
a.) If so how many times?
12.) Have you ever forgotten to advise your clients of what was going on in their cases?
a.) If so how many times?
13.) Have you ever refused to call your clients back?
a.) If so how many times?
14.) Do you get lots of “crazy ” clients who fill up your in box and make it impossible for others to leave messages?
15.) Are you a full time attorney or a part time attorney, or a hobby attorney?
16.) Have you ever refused to answer interrogatories and requests for production of documents on behalf of your clients?
17.) How many times on average do you post pone a case because you are not prepared?
18.) Have your clients ever been sanctioned in court due to your unwillingness, or forgetfulness to turn over the requested documentation?
I would also ask some of these questions to the attorney before you hire them as suggested by others… I did a search and these are the links that came up. Wish I had known all of this before. Of course no matter how good of questions you ask you can still find incompetent people. I guess the thing to do is pay attention, be vigilant and question everything.
Now keep in mind, that people can blow smoke in the right places. So even after you hire someone and have asked all of the correct questions, you can still find yourself in trouble. In my case, I didn’t even know what questions were the right ones to ask. So I want to do my part in providing the education for others so they have a better chance of not going through what we are going through with this case.
My attorney which I have not named. Will be going through his hearing this week. I don’t know what will happen. It is not my place to decide and I am happy for that. However I would like to spread the word about attorneys who do these things to their clients.
I don’t know how things work in your state. But in Nebraska honesty is the best policy, and the courts have decided this in agreeing that attorneys should police themselves. The bad thing about this is that if the attorneys know someone has done some thing bad and they choose to stand behind them anyway, because of their own dealings with said attorney, then the public becomes the victim with out a leg to stand on.
Thankfully in our case, some attorneys have stepped up to the plate and are working to resolve our issues.
PLEASE NOTE: When you report an attorney to The Council for Discipline it makes a whole lot more work for you and you gain nothing for it except that you will know you have done everything you can do to protect the next person who may encounter this attorney.
This does not FIX any wrong doing they have done on your behalf.
We are still learning about all of this. We learned more about it yesterday, which is why I am writing now. I don’t know how the disciplinary hearing will go. I am sure it won’t be fun.
Further information: While it does not apply to us at this point because we have been issued no funds due to the unfinished and messy nature of our case… grrr… If you were supposed to have received funds from a party and they have transferred those monies to your attorney and your attorney for some reason has sat on those funds here is information regarding that. I have heard that this has happened as well to others. I think the term they use here is misappropriation of funds..
Learning a lot today. Glad to finally be able to start thinking again. Yesterday durring our appointment I was so exhausted I couldn’t understand the papers in front of me. Today, I am doing much better and I have managed to consume quite a lot of information. =D Which totally makes me happy.
I have yet to read the latest Harry Potter book! I plan to do so before seeing any of the movies. This may mean that I should start to look for the book! Yea! I love my new glasses! They are working!!! YipeEEEEEEEEE!
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