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Report: #1359815

Complaint Review: Judith Mitnick - Falls Church Virginia

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  • Reported By: Samuel — Mclean Virginia USA
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  • Judith Mitnick 400 S Maple Ave, Suite 210 Falls Church, Virginia USA

Judith Mitnick Attorney at Law Firm of Needham Mitnick & Pollack Financial Abuse of the Elderly by Lawyer Falls Church Virginia

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Judith Mitnick, Attorney and the law firm of Needham, Mitnick and Pollack (NMP) took control of the Drakuliches’ lives and $700,000 nest egg, as it had done in six similar cases in Fairfax County. It charged wards up to $125 an hour — its normal professional rates — for personal services, such as renewing dog licenses, sorting boxes and preparing instructions on emptying a dryer’s lint trap, court records show. NMP billed the Drakuliches $6,300 to prepare $1,800 worth of household items for auction, another ward $2,300 to sell a $4,000 car and a third person in their care $4,200 to recover $5,300 worth of investments, a court investigator found. The Drakulich family calls the bills exorbitant; NMP says they are normal legal bills. [Seriously? Not from what I’ve seen. And do they think that calling them typical for lawyers is going to sound like a good thing to anyone but another lawyer?] The firm says it and other firms can’t afford to become guardians unless they are allowed to charge their regular rates. [Which is a good reason why they shouldn’t be guardians in general, just when and if there’s a real legal issue.] Virginia has no cap on fees attorneys can charge for guardianship work or even basic guidelines about how much they should be compensated. … When one of the Drakuliches’ daughters questioned NMP’s fees, the firm charged her parents $975 for its response, records show. Family members say such billings left them afraid to confront the firm for fear it would be their loved ones who would pay. [This kind of retaliatory billing is a common problem, and the family’s response is also typical, especially if they think the system is rigged.] And when the county’s watchdog told NMP to refund about $229,000 in billings in seven cases last year, the law firm challenged the order in a precedent-setting case that could land before Virginia’s Supreme Court. The firm also made what family members considered a galling demand: NMP wanted the seven wards it was accused of overbilling to pick up its $165,000 legal tab…. In another Virginia case, a lawyer in Arlington County billed a mentally disabled ward $800 to throw him a party at Hooters and $725 to travel from Virginia to the District to pick up his birth certificate, among $19,000 in charges that a court ultimately ordered to be refunded.

This year, a Falls Church lawyer was found guilty of embezzling $275,000 from an elderly couple for which she was serving as guardian…. Virginia has a schedule of fees for how much conservators should charge, but the law says only that guardians are entitled to “reasonable” compensation — a fuzzy term that some say leaves wards vulnerable to overbilling…. “It will have a significant chilling effect on the willingness of attorneys to serve as independent guardians and conservators if they can’t charge their professional rates,” said NMP’s attorney Bernard DiMuro. [DiMuro is a former Virginia Bar president I’ve known for years — for better then worse.] … DiMuro said NMP is appealing the ruling to Virginia’s Supreme Court — a move backed by many lawyers in Virginia. [The lawyers assume the Supreme Court will support the bar over the general public — another problem with the incestuous relationship between lawyers and the bodies that are supposed to be regulating them. Where, for example, is the Virginia Bar, which loves to claim that it’s protecting the public from all manner of nefarious legal wrongdoing, just not the part that matters.]… “NMP did not hurt my parents in the sense that it made them destitute,” Drakulich-Clarke said. “But they carefully calibrated so there would have been nothing left in their estate when they were gone.” [That’s an astute observation that we can confirm from many similar situations, including divorces, fights over benefits and estates, and so on: The lawyer’s fee is calibrated to the amount they can get and, if that runs out, so do they.]

This report was posted on Ripoff Report on 03/04/2017 08:21 PM and is a permanent record located here: https://www.ripoffreport.com/reports/judith-mitnick/falls-church-virginia-20120/judith-mitnick-attorney-at-law-firm-of-needham-mitnick-pollack-financial-abuse-of-the-e-1359815. The posting time indicated is Arizona local time. Arizona does not observe daylight savings so the post time may be Mountain or Pacific depending on the time of year. Ripoff Report has an exclusive license to this report. It may not be copied without the written permission of Ripoff Report. READ: Foreign websites steal our content

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