Legal Question in Family Law in California
My paralegal continues to make errors on my docs. He finally admitted to entering erroneous info from "someone else's" docs - this is resulting in time, more money with back/forth emails for clarification and editing. Do I have any recourse with him - he "says" he does not charge for editing his errors but my divorce is fairly simple, not contested, and the $2500 retainer is being sucked dry. Any advice how to handle this? It is close to being done so I do not want to "jump ship" to another office.
2 Answers from Attorneys
You are being ripped off. That is an insane amount of money to pay for document preparation services, and if they are providing more than document preparation they have stepped into the practice of law. You need to replace them and demand a full refund for any papers not yet finalized. You also need to check whether they are certified and if not they owe you all your money back and have committed a crime. If you've got $2,500 for a simple divorce you could have hired a lawyer on a limited scope representation for that or less.
Mr. McCormick is absolutely correct. Proper preparation of pleadings is not an "add water and stir" event. An experienced family law attorney evaluates the totality of the case, trouble shoots issues that may impact your legal rights and obligations and produces quality work that won't cost substantial amounts of legal fees in correcting errors that are discovered at a later date.
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