Joseph Greenwald & Laake

I'll forever regret my decision to hire Barbara Jorgensen as my divorce attorney. I am still suffering from the repercussions. My divorce should have been simple. My ex had a warrant out for his arrest due to a crime against a neighbor. He also had priors and had engaged in many actions causing great risk to me. I'd just been diagnosed with lifelong critical illness but this was pushed into taking on the impossible. The economy had collapsed and the property (that the ex was afraid to go near) was severely upside down in value. He wasn't contributing towards the property payments, and left me with an unmanageable number of expenses that were his responsibility. Barbara Jorgensen ignored all of these circumstances. She even told me that types of support other divorcees were successfully arranging did "not exist" and that his crimes and lack of financial contributions were somehow irrelevant to his demands for money that did not exist. While she may have advocated for her clients back in 1985, both her skills and focus were very outdated decades later. She was often outright condescending towards me as her client and kept confusing my account for another client's who was delinquent in payments. She also told me I had no choice but to continue with tasks and expenses for superfluous actions from my ex's attorney whereas in reality I could have walled away or ignored most of it. It was well known that the mess drained my savings and left me in a literal long-term trap. As a final display of not caring about her clients, she even sent a disruptive and embarrassing younger attorney to court the day my ridiculous divorce agreement was filed. I was leery of most of her decisions but was going off of Washingtonian Magazine's endorsements. This is not an attorney who will advise to your benefit. This is the type of lawyer who still believes that attorneys are automatically respected and assumed to be brilliant, thereby giving them the ability to make up rules and advice that their clients won't question. This may have been the case in 1985 but certainly wasn't by then. With the immature JGL junior attorney solidifying my overall impression, I've steered friends and colleagues away from this firm ever since.