I hate attorneys

Yes, I am an attorney, but I hate attorneys. Okay, that's not fair. There are a few good ones. A FEW!!!

I just finished writing a complaint to the State Bar about an attorney. I was representing a client against a restraining order. We were in court on the day of the hearing and we negotiated a stipulation. No restraining order.

On the day of that hearing, the other attorney served a petition for dissolution on my client. The answer would be due 30 days later.

Shortly after that, I served on that attorney my client's declaration of disclosure, and discovery. The attorney served responses to the discovery on me. Yet, at the same time, she filed a request for default 3 days before she served the discovery responses because I hadn't filed my client's response by the deadline.

Now, even though you might think that she had the right to do that since I hadn't filed my client's response on time, that's not really true. It's unethical. She should have called me and said, "Hey, I noticed that you haven't filed your response yet. I'm going to file a request for default within X days if you don't do this." This would have been the courteous thing to do. It's not like she didn't know who the attorney was. She saw that I was working on the case and not just sitting back eating bon bons. I had served the declaration of disclosure and the discovery. She should have known that if I hadn't filed the response, there must have been an inadvertence.

I had to drive to Riverside with a stipulation to set aside the default and she signed it, and then I filed it with the court. The court finally filed it the other day, and yesterday I sent my client's response as well as other documents to the court to be filed.

My client is now trying to use this situation to his advantage and says that because I screwed up his case, he wants his money back. LOL!!! I can understand that someone would be upset that they are in default at no fault of his own, but I can't seem to get it through his head that I fixed the problem and now his case is as if no default had ever been filed. He thinks it's all screwed up, and yet his case is fine. At this point, everything has been done that should have been done. All that's left, if they don't fight over anything else, is filing the paperwork for the final judgment. I don't know how the response didn't get filed. I thought we faxed it, but I can't find the fax confirmation page.

I think I know why he thinks his case is messed up: He told me that he consulted with other attorneys who told him that they will have to charge him a lot of money to fix the case, that it was screwed up because of the default. I tried explaining to him that those attorneys just want to make money off my client. I explained that a stipulation had been signed and sent to the court, but it takes a few days for the court to sign it and file it, and that those attorneys didn't know that I had sent a signed stipulation to the court.

But this has also taught me something. In the future, if a client comes to me complaining about something that his/her current attorney is doing or not doing, I'm going to ask the client to let me call the attorney to find out what's going on. It could be that there's a reasonable explanation. Why should the client pay a new attorney to fix something if it's not really broken? Isn't it the client we should all be concerned about protecting?

But see, most attorneys would take advantage of a client who is in the situation in which I guess I put my client, even if inadvertently. They just see dollar signs.