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 ·Rogers Hi-Speed
| reply to LazMan
Re: [Excessive/unfair] lawyer [fees].........unreal. said by LazMan:Forcing her to give him a mortgage against the property before he'd proceed...
I didn't read it as having forced her.
quote:
As it advanced, her lawyer said he wouldn't continue unless she allowed him to secure a $100,000 mortgage against her property, at 18 per cent interest per year.
For one thing, we have her side, and only her side of the story here. I suspect that lawyer wouldn't continue unless she paid him for the work he did. Hardly unreasonable on his part. And could well be that the lawyer made the pretty good "guess" that expecting that he'd ever get paid from a judgment against her ex as being pretty damned remote.
Having asked her to pay, her likely response was "I have no money. All I have is my house." I don't know about you, but I don't work for free against some faint hope of ever seeing a dime.
If she had a modest amount of intelligence, she should have talked to her bank and borrowed against that equity, and paid her lawyer. If and when she got any money out of her ex, she could have paid that loan back. It would have been smart to borrow just enough to cover her expected legal fees and interest on that new loan for a decent length of time.
But she wasn't very smart, and her lawyer screwed her with an unnecessary 18% mortgage.
So long story short, dumb person got screwed by a lawyer. Yes, this is a repeat of 10,000 stories like it every year since the dawn of the written language and advent of lawyers. 
And as with all such things, there will be the usual howls for the law society to get involved or for there to be some sort of legislation to "protect" her from her own stupidity. I'm not opposed to all such things, but realistically? There's only so much you can do.
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“Any claim that the root of a problem is simple should be treated the same as a claim that the root of a problem is Bigfoot. Simplicity and Bigfoot are found in the real world with about the same frequency.” – David Wong |
