Business ProfileforCornerstone Law, LLC

If I could give Cornerstone Law office zero stars, that would be too generous. ******************************* is a predatory attorney (if you want to even call him that) who uses disturbing tactics to collect money. This man charged my mothers estate $1250.00 after we terminated him as our representative stating that he already completed documents, however a probate was never filed. Furthermore, he did not contact me about this until after I moved on with probate with a more respectable attorney. The fee was paid as to not prolong an already difficult process and it took ******** days to provide a receipt to myself and the court, even though he stated it would only take a few minutes as it is done electronically. He ignored multiple calls and emails, having his receptionist tell us that he was in meetings all day, everyday. His biases were evident from the beginning and my family received bad vibes from him since the start, hence the termination. I would not trust him for the estate planning of my cats, let alone anyone that I love.

Unfortunately, being an attorney who has provided representation, I cannot respond directly by discussing the situation. Doing so would require disclosure of information you might consider private or confidential and attorneys are bound by client confidentiality. I can, however, speak about how Cornerstone normally does things.

At Cornerstone, our clients always enter into a written fee agreement before we begin, and we never pressure clients to do so. Our clients have every opportunity to not hire us, to think it over, and to cancel after hiring us before work has begun (and even after weve started, as Ill talk about in just a bit).

Once we have a signed fee agreement, we consider ourselves hired and begin working on the thing we were hired for. In fact, our clients would probably get mad if we just sat there and did nothing. Its reasonable, therefore, to expect well get started shortly after you hire us. For probates, we hope to be ready to file a probate within a month of being hired. But actually filing the probate depends on the participation of the client. If the client is absent, all we can do is follow up and wait.

Every one of our clients can fire us at any time for any reason. If they do, but weve already done some work, we still expect to get paid for the work we did before we were fired. Our fee agreements spell out how fees are charged in those situations. For hourly work thats our time times our rate. Under a flat fee agreement, its calculated by referencing the early termination section of our flat fee agreements. We dont charge for most work after the client has indicated their desire to terminate us (if work is still mandated by a court or is required under professional ethics, then we may still charge for that work). If the terminating client refuses to pay, we have various rights as a creditor to seek payment.

I regret that you think asking for fair, agreed upon compensation and waiting for it patiently for over half a year is predatory and greedy. Most of Cornerstones clients value our up-front flat fee pricing and other transparent disclosures about our services.