Keith & Lorfing

If I could give 0 stars I would! My son was going through something that was just completely blown out of proportion, and I hired Russell Lorfing to help. Originally he pawned us off on Joel Wilkes, but after seeing how Joel handled the expulsion hearing with the school, we asked to work with Russell directly. We paid them $5,000 for a retainer fee and was never explained how anything worked, just asked to sign on the dotted line. The whole time we had horrible communication and never got updates. I constantly had to follow up with them to check on the case. Most of the time- we actually heard from the probation officer with updates before we EVER heard from Russell and his team. When we did finally hear updates, it was either information we had already spoken to someone else about, or nothing new. We constantly asked for explanations as we had never been through something like this and we could tell Russell was being impatient and just ready to be done with us. At one point, he told us he was so embarrassed by his staff’s lack of communication that he would refund our money and let us find someone else. (We should have taken him up on it). I actually went to the school directly and had my son’s expulsion lowered myself and I was frustrated that we paid so much money- only to have to do things ourselves. After not being able to come to an agreement with the court, we were set to attend a Juvenile Jury. Russell knew almost nothing about Juvenile trials and should have never taken our case. Not to mention- he lied to us multiple times. At the beginning, he told us he was going to sue the county/city/state for free for us- which we knew quickly was never going to happen. At one time, he also told us he wanted to buy my son shoes (which I explained he didn’t need to) but he insisted after he knew we were frustrated (Bribery). However, we never ACTUALLY got the shoes. When confronted about being a liar, he told me he had planned on buying the shoes after my sons trial- which was VERY hard to believe considering the trial was nearly a year away. Why ask for someone’s shoe size that early if you are going to buy them shoes a year from now?! We finally got fed up when he asked for $5400 more to continue working on the case. I asked why we were paying this amount of money before the trial considering nothing had really been done up until this point, and Russell got immediately defensive and basically screamed at me that he was dropping us altogether. I’m sorry, but when a lawyer is that emotional off of a simple question of “what have you done so far to earn this additional $5400?” – he probably shouldn’t be a lawyer! After he told me he was going to drop us, I told him about how I thought we had been lied to, and he started recording me on the call, and I hung up. He then preceded to text me how, “HE HAD NEVER HAD A CLIENT HANG UP ON HIM IN HIS CAREER.” After signing the motion to withdrawal counsel, I asked for a refund for what we had already paid him, and he refused. I am very disappointed in how this was handled. After taking a step back, we are dealing with a 10 yr olds case, and for him to not look at that situation and understand that says VOLUMES about his character. He would rather put a working class family in a bind over $5000 with nothing to show for it, than be the bigger person and refund us, accept his lack of responsibility with this case and move on. I would NEVER RECOMMENDED him to anyone!