update 2: THIS REVIEW HAS BEEN SOMEHOW DELETE PREVIOUSLY BY EISNER & GORIN LLP
This lawyer claims to be in the top 3% of the country's law firms, but what he doesn't tell you is that this top 3% is for incompetence, laziness and deception. He will take your money and not only fail to formulate a defense, but he will also sell you up the river. Here is a short list of what he did to me, if this doesn't convince you of his incompetence and malicious intent, nothing will.
1. Without my knowledge, as part of my self-surrender agreement (an agreement I had no awareness of) I was supposed to turn in my devices with incriminating evidence - in violation of my 5th amendment rights. This not only pre-supposes guilt in my case, but also ended with additional charges and years on my sentence when I turned in devices with no incriminating evidence on them! The Government tacked on an obstruction of justice charge (assuming I had deleted evidence) simply because I had a popular cookie cleaner program on my hard drive. I don't know if this lawyer was selling me up the river as part of a bargain to get some other clients off, but this action go beyond incompetence, there had to be malicious intent for him to mislead me. A real cybercrimes lawyer later told me that this type of "deal" is ridiculously stupid and damaging.
2. He charged me several thousands for an expert witness to testify that no one profited from the link I posted, because the link was dead, but the expert wasn't invited and my lawyer didn't even mention it at sentencing. I have him on email saying that it is highly relevant but he actually forgot! All he could remember was to ask for more money, bankrupting my family in the process, and continuously postponing my case. He promised and deceived me with false hope that I would get credit for the 4 years of pretrial home confinement, but when he mentioned this at sentencing, the judge actually laughed as if this was so preposterous that it was not even a serious consideration. In the end, for the action of posting a dead link on a forum and posting how to get malware from Google for free, despite being the lowest class member on a hierarchy of dozens of people, I was fined $568 million and sentenced to 10 years in prison. The same as the founder of the website, who also ran multitudes of criminal enterprises. No one except myself and this man received so much time and other of my equivalent position received probation or 2-3 years and they had public defenders so their defense was free! This lawyer literally could not have done worst!
3. He makes the ridiculous claim of being a cybercrime lawyer, but I have doubts that he is even computer literate. He did not know even the most basic terminology and I had to buy him a laptop so we could check evidence from the prosecutor. During sentencing he could not even set up the Zoom Conference, and this circus he ran costed me dearly, as I'll explain in point #4.
4. I paid Alan Eisner more than $60,000 to defend me, and his defense for this sum amounted to the following words directly from my sentencing transcripts:
Eisner: ... I just don't want to minimize that ... that fact ...
[ Technical Difficulties ]
The Court: You're breaking up Mr Eisner, if you could go back a little bit ...
[ Technical Difficulties ]
Eisner: Sorry that's on me end ...
The Court: You were saying ...
Eisner: Well, I'll leave it at that. We have admitted to a substantial factual basis. We don't want to minimize it. He's here before you accepting responsibility.
This is insane! His defense for me sounded like he was the prosecutor! A lawyer's job is to minimize every factor possible and he didn't bother to repeat what he had to say. The only other thing he had to say in my defense was that I had a job and a good family. Where was the competent legal argument ? A drunk bum off the street could have done better. The negligence and erroneous advices I received from this lawyer caused my family so much misery that I feel compelled to prevent him from victimizing other people if it is in my power to do so and prevent him to take advantage of someone else because of my silence. This lawyer saw me, my wife and child as easy targets because of our language barriers and ignorance of U.S law. I wonder how many others are helpless in prison, broke, and suffering because of him. This man is the epitome why lawyers get a bad name.
This are Valerian's words, and I, Valerian's wife and attorney-in-fact posted this review on his behalf. Valerian has self surrendered and is serving his 10 year sentence. read more