Sandberg Pheonix & von Gontard PC

It was hard to apply the two star rating, because there is more than one aspect to this review. When I first encountered lawyers from Sandberg Phoenix, it was at a introductory seminar about trust funds and inheritance related issues, in connection with business ownership. At that time, I was deeply impressed with the quality of the representatives of this law firm. So I decided to see if they could help us with our estate and business needs. As I explained to the lawyer what our situation is and what our company does, he said he found that the business sounded very interesting. So I ventured to invite him to come see it, whenever he could take the time. Some weeks later, he did tour our facilities. He told me that in order to work out a proper legal frame work for all our worldly possessions, he would put together a quote and submit it to us for approval. We agreed to this mode of cooperation.nA few weeks later, I took some papers to their offices downtown, and I met another lawyer of that team. We introduced ourselves and made some small talk, to be courteous, then talked also briefly about what should happen next, then the lawyer took me back to my car, which was parked on the street behind their block. I thought, wow, what wonderful and considerate folks!nThen, we got 2 invoices, one for the time spent by the one lawyer for his courtesy visit to our business, the other for the time I spent giving the other lawyer my papers and making polite conversation, and for his reading up on some legal regulations pertaining to the issue at hand. Total incurred: about 2,000 $ give or take a few!!! And we had not gotten any service from them yet whatsoever! nI have several gripes with this: 1) I wish they would be up front to tell customers when the invoicing clock starts to tick. After all, we are the ones who pay. I would not make a syllable of small talk, if it were at the tune of 400 bucks/hour! n2) Why do so-called experts in a legal field have to first read up and smarten up about their supposed field of expertise? We are experts in our field at my business, and we know it to the last iota, since that is why the industry considers us to be the experts! We would never dream of expecting a customer to pay for us to read and know all about whatever we need to know to serve this industry we work for! n3) What happened to the "we will submit an estimate and a proposal first" promise???nThe way they work is what I would label the "separation of offices" model: The layers have to only report how much time they spent with whom, then the invoicing office simply invoices the time to that customer. What the lawyers fail to communicate is what portion of the time was actually spent working on the legal files. And the lawyers may not get to see the invoice, or sign off on it before it goes out, so even if they wanted to make a correction, they cannot.nAnyhow, once I'm burnt I won't go back...this was a breech of my trust. There are thousands of law firms out there, and hopefully a few who operate by a fair invoicing standard!nAll things considered, I'd rather do business with lawyers who occupy normal office space, and not those high-end, extremely costly and hip downtown digs, where they need to invoice even potty time to pay for their luxury accommodations!nnIt caused me to lose my trust in this business. n

Decent