I am an officer for a non-profit and we hired Jim Campbell of Campbell-Flannery for two tasks:
1) Represent us in the sale of assets and develop an agreement for such a sale
2) Represent us in a law suit against our Treasurer who mis-appropriated funds
For the asset sale, we expected Jim to use his legal knowledge to keep us out of trouble when selling or otherwise disposing of assets. He wrote up an agreement to sell all of our assets and when the IRS saw it after the sale, they said it was an illegal sale of assets. The agreement Jim wrote was illegal in its basic makeup. He even had a paragraph in the agreement that spelled out the illegal part of the transaction. We hired him to keep us legal and he did just the opposite. He clearly did not know what he was doing.
In court he did even worse. He said he would request certain documentation from the defendant and never followed-through with that. He filed documents with the court that had the wrong name for the organization on them, as if he was using some type of boilerplate document and failed to change the names. He did not familiarize himself with the case, even though I personally provided him with a great deal of material. When opposing counsel started to tear him apart, he was not able to think on his feet and came up with a pathetic approach that made no sense at all. I could see the judge and everyone else (including me) perplexed at his line of questioning that only reinforced the case being presented by the defendant's competent attorney. It was embarrassing. He failed to call any of our witnesses to the stand, even though several had been subpoenaed. He was late for trial, missing a pre-trial meeting, and it seems that all he wanted to do was to get it over and move on to something else. The judge had no problem tossing the case out. In my experience, Jim Campbell has limited knowledge of the law; no instincts to help in unfamiliar situations in court, and no real desire to do much of anything besides collect his fees. He clearly is NOT an attorney who I would hire again for ANYTHING. read more
