| Litchney Law Firm |
| Litchney Law Firm told me 100 days to complete a chapter 7 bankruptcy, had me pay in full, 10 months later, still no response to my emails or calls F |
| 4th of May, 2011 by User941144 |
| I was researching the internet for a bankruptcy lawyer that can handle my request to file a chapter 7 bankruptcy. I found a clean professional looking website and decided to give Litchney Law Firm my information. In response, I went through their process, received a 15-20 minute phone call asking a series of questions from their attorney Lucas Garcia and was led to believe I could trust this lawyer to handle chapter 7 filing efficiently. Lucas mentioned on the phone, provided you can pay us in full and provide the documents, we can complete your case filing and discharge 100 days from the date you pay us in full. He even mentioned giving me a discount from the original chapter 7 filing fee of $2200 down to $1495 with a $299 court filing fee provided I paid in full before July 20, 2010. I sent both cashiers checks and all the documents needed in certified mail on July 14, 2010. From that point on I entrusted Lucas word to handle my case efficiently, and to notify me if theres anything I'm lacking. After the first talk, the next time I spoke with Lucas was in October 2010. I found myself conducting all the follow ups with no responses to a majority of my emails or voice mail messages, and the response from Litchney Law Firm has stayed the same. That my case is being worked on and in some sort of prescedings. I became disgruntled and upset, by the time I finally spoke to Lucas again in October 2010, I requested my refund, and he told me if he was to refund me, that I'd owe more that what I paid for based on the work they put into my case. I have no properties or cars under my name. What I do have is a lot of bad credit and collections from mistakes I made when I was younger, and decided that I wanted a fresh start with no debts. His response to me was that my case would be completed sometime by July 2011 because they have huge flow of other cases. I asked him what happened to the 100 days as you mentioned when we first spoke. I left the case alone, because I wasn't getting anywhere with any responses from the same old answer that Litchney Law Firm phone personnel provided me. That my case is being worked on, but they can't seem to give me an actual status update. My family told me to pick up the phone, give Litchney Law Firm a call, and see if I can get a response on the status of my chapter 7 filing. Currently, its approaching 10 months on May 15, 2011 since I've paid in full. I have sent several emails since Friday April 29, 2011 and left two voicemails, and have tried to get in touch with an attorney or the person in charge of my case. My calls seem to be screened, and even if I mentioned I'm going to call the California State Bar Association and report this, my call is still screened from speaking with an attorney. I was told by the their phone clerk Christy that I should expect and email from Justina regarding status of my file, and so far its just an empty promise. After 3 more emails stretching from Apr 29th 2010, May 2-3, and two follow up calls on May 3-4, still no response either by email or phone. I decided to speak and request 2nd opinions from a bankruptcy attorney that helped my parents file their chapter 7. The attorney that helped my parents mentioned that because I have no properties, no cars, and mostly collections under my name, that my case isn't complicated using current software intended to organizing my filing and that it'd typically take at least 3 hours of work to put what I submitted in order. Lucas from Litchney Law Firm said that its not worth requesting a refund from their firm because I would owe more than what I originally paid based on the amount work per hour. It is approaching 10 months this coming May 15, 2011 and I'm still getting the same answer, that Litchney Law Firm is working on my case. |
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THE ABOVE POSTING IS COMPLETELY FALSE. WE WOULD NEVER TREAT A CLIENT IN THAT MANNER. PLEASE READ BELOW FOR PROOF AND EXACT DETAILS.
As we all know, there are always two sides to each story. While this website has a firm policy of never removing a posting, or allowing it to be edited (unless you go through a program of theirs that costs at this time $2, 000). They do at least allow the companies a chance to defend themselves through a rebuttal that is then posted below the original report. We were extremely diligent with the former client above, and in fact it is he who completely cut off communication with us for almost 7 months.
We will address the details of the posting made by this client, going through each fact showing all who may read this that the statements made by the client are indeed 100% false. We will also post below the exact disengagement letter that was sent to the client laying out in 5 pages of detail the exact facts as they are represented by our firm in records, correspondence and electronically stored emails and as communicated to the client.
At the end of the day the fact remains that the above situation is an unusual one for us to encounter, no Attorney wishes to be adversarial with their client. We prefer to receive the thank you notes, flowers and even baked goods from our appreciative clients and not defamatory untrue reports posted to this site.
The discovery of this review was extremely upsetting to the firm and all of our employees who worked diligently on this clients file. His report is full of lies, misrepresentations, and twisted facts all of which we will set straight. In doing so we ask any who may read this to consider this…if we truly operated in the manner in which the author, our former client now, states that we acted do you think we would still be in business? Would we get as many personal referrals as we do from other satisfied clients (current and previous) who refer their families, friends and co-workers? Would we be rated the top law firm in the area consistently over the last few years? The answer is obviously no.
If we ignored our clients and treated them in the manner indicated above, we would have State Bar issues (of which we have none). None of our attorneys have any investigations in place nor do they have any disciplinary action that has been taken against them. In addition, if you were to visit the Better Business Bureau’s website for our business listing you would see that we have an excellent rating (after many years in business) and in fact one of the reasons the BBB gives to support this rating is the fact that we have a low number of complaints received for a firm of our size. We have thousands of current clients and we have had thousands of past clients, so we strongly believe this speaks to how we treat our clients and their cases.
Our attorneys are decent and upstanding individuals who care about their clients and their cases. They work long hours and go the extra mile to make sure that their clients best interests are at all times being carefully guarded. They all worked extremely hard to get to where they are now…spending 7-8 years in school between College and Law School, attending some of the top law schools in the nation and now carrying large student loan balances as a result. To think that they would risk all of their hard work and Attorney licenses to then remain saddled with a lot of educational debt (which is non-dischargeable in bankruptcy) in order to mistreat the clients for some reason, just doesn’t add up. Our society fortunately doesn’t stand for those who operate in such a fashion, those who take money and then do not provide services. If these types of operations do pop up, they are put out of business a very short time later. We have been in business at our headquarters in the exact same location for the last 4 years and prior to that we were just down the same street.
Again, we were extremely diligent with the former client above, and in fact it is he who completely cut off communication with us for almost 7 months. In the short period he was our client prior to these 7 months we had constant contact and communication and he had a detailed list in his possession which he acknowledged receiving of the specific documents and questions to be answered (23 total) that we needed in order to file his bankruptcy petition with the courts. Documents and information that the bankruptcy trustees and judges REQUIRE to even have a case filed.
He was told by Mr. Garcia on October 12th, 2010 that once he provided the documents we needed and had repeatedly asked him for the last few months that his bankruptcy would be filed by the next Friday (not next July!). He never returned any of that which we asked for and he ignored any of our follow-up attempts after the 12th.
For our entire representation he had consistent phone troubles; our staff all had issues with several of his numbers that he provided…receiving out of service messages, disconnected numbers, no ability to leave a message, getting hung up on etc. He also told us he may be moving to Bakersfield, which we informed him was in a different bankruptcy district for filing. Once he decided (at the urging of his family who he lives with) as he states above, to start following up with us again after he disappeared for 7 months, he attempted to place the blame on us for the delay, when in fact our records prove that it was the other way around. The only explanation we can think of for why he would go to such lengths, and this is an assumption, is that his family must have assisted him in paying for his bankruptcy and in order to not have them upset with him for his lack of response since he states they prompted him to call us finally, he instead tried to pass the blame to us.
Mr. Garcia did not say the things the former client says he did, and again you have to ask yourself, why would he? In the end once we knew of this report we attempted to work it out with the client by offering him $400.00 for his time in updating his report correctly online. Not in an attempt to get him to “lie” or go back on what he calls his original experience with the firm, but in an attempt in what we hoped would result in the former client accepting responsibility for what happened and giving him an opportunity to correct the many false statements he made previously. We were hoping he would accomplish this by drafting a statement to be posted to the site that we merely asked to read prior to his posting it as we wanted to make sure that it covered all that needed to be covered, because again as we know and as the client knows now this site will not allow posts to be edited, or deleted once posted.
Unfortunately the former client saw fit instead of working amicably with us so that we could all move forward to attempt to again twist what we had told him. To think we would offer him $400 to post anything untrue about us is ridiculous.
At the end of the day, we all know that any business will get complaints but it is how the business handles those complaints that matters. If a client of ours is not happy, we will try to understand why and we will bend over backwards to make sure moving forward we do everything possible to earn their satisfaction-much like we have done up to this point with this client. The client did not tell us of the post that he made on this website, but rather continued allowing us to expediently serve him. We even scheduled an appointment between a staff member, attorney and the client to meet with him on a weekend when we are normally closed, but he cancelled showing up in person last minute stating he shared a car with his family and his case manager provided him with her personal cell phone number which he called and texted constantly.
After consulting with our independent Ethics Attorney and the State Bar Ethics service we were advised that the attorney/client relationship had broken down and the actions he had taken and the false statements he had made now created a conflict of interest so severe that there was no viable alternative option and we were forced to disengage him as a client and we were unable to file his bankruptcy as we could not continue representing him. We issued him a refund, reimbursed him for his credit counseling costs as promised and gave him a copy of his nearly completed bankruptcy petition along with the disengagement letter posted below (with personal information redacted).
We hope to never have a similar situation with a client again. |
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The below is the actual text of the detailed disengagement letter that we sent the client, which goes into the specifics of the actual events of our professional relationship as they truly occurred and as they are saved in our electronic client database program. A program which is incapable of having dates changed, adding or changing past notes made and is a true and accurate record. The letter shows what the client said to be absolutely false. Sensitive and confidential client information has of course been removed, and as the client made the post anonymously we will not be publishing his name to protect those confidences.
May 25, 2011
CLIENT NAME (REMOVED)
CLIENT ADDRESS (REMOVED)
Dear Client Name:
Please read this entire letter carefully and thoroughly, as it contains very important information for you. It is with much reluctance and a heavy heart that our firm must issue you this letter of disengagement. This letter serves as our formal written notification that our law firm will no longer be providing you with the legal services that you contacted our firm regarding. This is being done under the direct advisement of our ethics attorney who has knowledge of the circumstances surrounding the conflict of interest (namely your posting of defamatory statements regarding us online), and the California State Bar Ethics Service and our obligations under the code of ethics that govern attorney conduct. There are several rules that the State Bar of California mandates all attorneys follow. At this point our obligation to follow these rules unfortunately prohibits our continued representation of your case because of your conduct as explained in detail below. We have never in our history and the thousands of clients we have assisted had to end a representation in this way.
As you know, it has recently come to our attention that on May 5, 2011 you posted certain blatantly false statements about our firm, our staff and attorneys and our relationship and handling of your case on a public and salacious website. On May 17, 2011, after having been made aware of your defamatory statements as posted online, the situation was discussed with myself and asked that I contact you in an attempt to come to a reasonable solution with you regarding your past actions that would then allow us to continue representing you and move forward as we had already been doing, amicably.
Namely, when I called you, we discussed the report and I asked you to retract and or amend the false statements you had made, of which there are many. As you mentioned to me during this conversation on the 17th, you stated that you felt bad after posting the report and you realizing that much of what you had written wasn’t true. You admitted that you had even already on your own, without being asked by us and prior to our discussing the report, contacted the website to ask them about removing the report. They informed you that they do not allow reports to be removed, you can only update them. You voluntarily offered at that moment with me to go online and update the report in order to correct the factual errors of what was said. I offered that in order to avoid continued misstatements of the truth, and to make sure that certain statements already made would be addressed in your update that you should first draft the update and send it to us for our review so that we could ensure the factual accuracy and correction of prior statements, especially given the fact that once posted the website does not allow for removal. We even offered to assist you by proof reading the statement that YOU drafted to ensure that you would not compound your defamatory statements and offered to compensate you for your time and troubles and effort in making this retraction/amendment. You said you were amenable and open to doing this and didn’t indicate you had any issue with what was being requested and stated that you would do so by that evening and send us what you had drafted so that we review it. However, you continued to mention that you wanted this offer in writing; we complied and emailed you the following statement that same day;
“Dear Client Name,
Per your discussion with your attorney this afternoon you agreed you will draft an update to the report that you filed online regarding our law firm since as you acknowledge you discovered as well, they do not allow for removals once posted. In order to ensure that your response covers the necessary points to be addressed we would like to review the update prior to you submitting it online. As compensation for your trouble your attorney informed you that we would be happy to refund $400 of the fee you paid for your bankruptcy services once we are able to review, edit if necessary, and you then post the agreed upon update.
Please feel free to send what you draft to either myself or to email address. Thank you!”
Again we were trying to fix the situation you had created in an amicable way so that we could continue our professional relationship.
However, that same evening on May 17th, against what we had discussed and against what you had told us, you logged onto this same website and submitted an update that only addressed the fact that you now understood why your case manager Justina couldn’t talk to you on the precise day you called, because she was out of the office (as you had already been told) due to a family emergency. You then went on to try to twist our offer in trying to work out what you had already submitted in the report into trying of assistance as described above, to make it look like we were trying to bribe you with money, and were asking you to lie. When all we wanted was for you to correct the already false statements you had made regarding our firm. Although not required to do so, we were being extremely generous in offering to compensate you for your time in doing so. It appears this was probably your intention all along, and your actions were premeditated and with intentional malice as to cause us further harm. You also continue to threaten us by stating you will report us to the State Bar when this entire time we have only been trying to help you.
On May 18, 2011 you emailed Justina in response letting her know that you had changed your mind and again had placed further false and defamatory statements in trying to twist our offer in a published source. Your actions and statements on the website are of course grounds for our firm to take immediate legal action against you by filing a lawsuit for defamation and a request for monetary damages to be awarded as a result of your statements, as you have direct knowledge that these statements you have made are patently false. By posting these false statements you have not only opened up the possibility of a lawsuit against you, but also and more upsetting to our firm and our staff have placed us in a position where we are forced to withdraw as your counsel because of ethics laws that govern attorneys as it would be a conflict of interest to continue to represent a person who has and is currently committing libelous defamation against our firm.
We are not looking to be hostile or adversarial. We are sympathetic to your financial situation and we were committed to taking care of you as a client. However, at this point, we have no choice but in order to protect ourselves we must warn you that we are already considering and should you continue with these defamatory statements online or anywhere else, we will be forced to proceed with legal action. Free speech is highly protected in the Constitution of the United States, but spreading false statements is not, it is also against the terms of use of the website at issue.
Your statements in the report contained many false and untrue statements. Below I will summarize for you only some of the false and damaging statements and the facts that disprove them below; otherwise this letter would grow to extreme length. Please note that these are all facts that you are well aware of and have been informed of for some time and so you cannot claim any ignorance (although ignorance is not a defense to defamation claims) nor can you claim that you attempted to find out the truth before making your remarks, as you give gave us little to no chance to discuss anything with you before going online and defaming us.
To make sure we are all on the same page, you had an initial consultation with me on 7/6/2010 and you engaged our firm for services on 7/14/2010 by sending in a signed attorney/client fee agreement, as well as the fee necessary for filing for bankruptcy and the court required filing fee. On the same day you were sent via email by our office our enrollment package which included a checklist of the documents and information we would need in order to start preparing your bankruptcy petition for filing, as required by the United States Trustee and Bankruptcy Code. We received your bankruptcy questionnaire on August 2nd, 2010, but it was filled out so poorly, much of the information requested wasn’t listed or filled out correctly and much of the supporting documentation requested wasn’t received.
After multiple reviews by our staff of your file and repeated attempts at asking you for the same information, in an effort to please you as you were voicing your displeasure, your case manager at that time spent hours piecing together what was needed from your questionnaire, and the documents you had turned in. After her review she sent you several emails to several email addresses as you asked requesting the additional necessary information and documents from you. Yet you continued to complain that we should be filing you quicker. You didn’t seem to understand that we can’t just merely file a petition that did not include the necessary and required information that we had been repeatedly requesting from you.
You claim in your report that you “found myself conducting all the follow ups with no responses to a majority of my emails or voice mail messages”. This too is completely false. On August 2, 2010 you turned in the initially requested documents to our office. They were missing a great deal of information and our offices attempted to contact you by either phone or email at least on 8/3, 8/4, 8/17, 8/17 (second call), 8/19, 8/26, and 8/27. Despite these contacts, you called on 9/6/2010 and stated that the process was taking too long and you wanted a full refund, but then at the end of the conversation you changed your mind regarding the refund. This appears to be odd behavior considering how well informed you were in several of those conversations of how matters were progressing. On September 10, 2010, a case manager contacted you to inform you of information they would need to complete the petition. After hours of further preparation due to your poorly completed and filled out documents, another email was sent to you on September 15, 2010 with an even further detailed list of items we still needed for the petition to be ready for filing with the court. This email was sent to both email addresses in the file to ensure delivery and in fact you replied to one of them showing us that you did in fact receive this email and the list that was needed. Late Friday afternoon on 9/17 you suddenly stated that (although it had only been just 35 business days since you first delivered just one piece of the required documents to our office and despite the fact we were moving forward with your case) that you felt the service was moving too slow for your desires and you asked for a refund. On Monday 9/20, 9/21, and 9/22 our office tried to make contact with you to resolve your concerns by contacting all three phone numbers on file and both email address. Finally on 10/11 (3 weeks later) you returned our call and we set an appointment for 10/12 to discuss your concerns with me.
This record of events shows that there is not even a tinge of truth to the statement that you claim to have conducted all the follow ups with no responses to a majority of your emails or voice mails. This kind of false statement is both defamatory, willful, and malicious to imply any shortcomings in light of that almost weekly contact record.
Second you claim that you were told in October of 2010 by me that “my case would be completed sometime by July 2011 because they have huge flow of other cases”. This was and is an absolute fabricated lie. You were called by me, on October 12, 2010 in a scheduled call as mentioned above, because you had claimed you were not getting responses to your calls and were requesting a refund. This was a request made despite the progress we had made on your case and the information we had asked for that you hadn’t returned. In that call, you stated that you had not received some of the email messages we said we had sent and it appears that you used multiple email addresses and would switch between them for those that you used and checked more frequently. I asked which email address you would like to be your primary email address. I then read to you over the phone the long list of items that had been sent via email to two email addresses you had already given us (one of which we know now you responded to, so we know you received it-see attached exhibit A), that we needed to complete your case.
In addition, I promised that if you replied as soon as possible to that email with the needed items, which you said you would, that we would be able to file your case by the very next Friday, which is a promise that held true…had you replied. You told me on the phone that you would respond to your case manager’s requests for the information necessary so that we could file your petition by this date, which we stood ready to do. Please note again that at that time if the list of items was supplied by you, our offices already had a petition typed and ready for filing save for the information to be supplied by you. Yet our requests to you for this information (a list of 23 items/questions/documents) so we could file your case, again went unanswered, this time for nearly 7 months. We weren’t sure of the reason for this, notes in your file also showed you had informed our office you were thinking of moving to a different city, which we informed you was in another bankruptcy district.
In the report you further compound matters by stating that you “left the case alone as you weren’t getting anywhere” for nearly 7 months, which is true. You didn’t respond nor contact us for nearly 7 months; however, it wasn’t because you weren’t getting anywhere, as we were trying to get you filed if you would have cooperated with our requests. You disappeared from October 12, 2010 until the beginning of May 2011 when you suddenly and out of the blue reappeared with a seemingly unwarranted urgency due to your own delay. During this entire time you were in possession of the list of items needed to complete your petition.
You called our office on Tuesday May 3rd asking for an update on a case which you hadn’t contacted us about in nearly 7 months. In an email to your case manager, Justina, that you sent around the same time period, you apologized for your past attitude and stated that you wanted to pick things back up and get filed. During this call you were again informed as you already knew, that your case manager was now Justina (which you had been informed of with another email sent by us to you that went unanswered on April 16, 2011) and that she was out of the office at the moment, but a message would be left for her to research your file and call you back. You called back the next day (Wednesday, May 4th) and again you were told that Justina would be getting back to you and to please allow her time to do so. The next day (and before you even filed the report online) when Justina was back in the office after nearly a week of being in and out of the office due to a family emergency (which had a close family member of hers in the hospital for over a week), she tried calling you twice. On one occasion the phone number you instructed for her to call rang, was answered and then was hung up before she could speak, and then in another occasion, the phone was answered and background noises and people talking could be heard, but the person who answered the phone never spoke to Justina. This was a similar phone issues to what our entire staff had experienced during our entire representation of your case. The next day first thing Justina contacted you again and was finally successful in reaching you to inform you that there were still the same documents needed as the last time we had communicated with you and also that there are now quite a few items from before that are out of date, but despite those delays we will expedite your file as fast as you can get your documents to us.
We even agreed to bring in staff on a Saturday, to meet you in person and work overtime in order to complete your case, as it seemed having you discuss all that was required in person might be in order to get you to comply with our requests. I even came in the office on that day to see you, but you cancelled showing up last minute that day because you stated you could not find transportation as you share a car with multiple family members. On May 11, 2011, after we discovered that your required credit counseling certificates had expired due to your delays, I called you to inform you that reimbursement for these fees had been approved and you would be compensated for any cost incurred to retake the test, this was not something we were required to do, but we were doing so in order to promote superior customer service. At no point did you inform our offices that you had already posted your false and defamatory statements on May 5, 2011. During the last few weeks you continued to work with Justina in preparing your case to be filed, she spent many hours assisting you and working on your file and communicated with you on almost a daily basis, sometimes even from her personal cellular phone which you are now asked to no longer utilize via voice or text.
The events of May 17th are detailed above, but the “update” you submitted online just made a bad situation even worse. We find all that you have stated and implied insulting and demeaning to our upstanding reputation and it also led to the degradation of our attorney/client relationship. Our primary concern is with the absolutely false asserts that you present as fact and imply as truth when in fact you knew them to be false.
As detailed above, we are no longer able to undertake any work on your behalf and as such there exists no attorney client relationship, and there is no balance owed on your account. Enclosed with this letter please find your nearly completed bankruptcy petition. As there were just a few items remaining to be completed, it is nearly ready for filing, however please note that this petition has not had the final attorney review that is typically done along with the client to catch any potential discrepancies as we had to withdraw before that took place, this is merely a draft and should be treated as such. As many hours were spent on your case and all that was left was to have the final review and petition signing appointment, file your case and attend your 341 hearing a refund is being made, this is actually more than should be refunded on a case that is this close to completion and that has as many hours spent on it as we have spent on yours and includes reimbursement for the credit counseling fee your family member paid for on your behalf. In addition to the refund being made via check your filing fee is being refunded via check as well.
If you have any question about any of the above information or matters, please let us hear from you in writing to our office at your earliest convenience. Please again heed our warning against making further defamatory statements, whether verbally or in writing, we will investigate them, we will take them seriously and we will act on them with everything in our legal power in order to defend our firm, employees and reputation. |
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