We hired Leo as our public adjuster for a complex insurance claim. Leo was the least professional /…read morecompetent service provider I have ever interacted with.
He didn't add value to the process (despite his enormous fee), and his negative attitude made an already stressful process even more unpleasant. He failed to live up to any of his customer service promises. Simply stated, I would never hire or recommend him to anyone else, even if his services were free.
Leo displayed an alarming lack of understanding/recollection of our claim, missing major items (totaling nearly $100K). He couldn't be bothered to review pictures, claim documents, etc. to identify major missing items--that burden fell entirely to me and my family.
Leo was not an effective or eager advocate on our behalf. He was consistently argumentative and demeaning. He reminded us on several occasions that he was "too busy" to keep our claim straight with all of the other things he had going on.
To illustrate, below are 2 examples (of many) that show his carelessness and lack of attention to detail.
1) After Leo suggested (based on his "17 years of experience") that we should take the initial (very low) offer from insurance, we asked why there was no allowance for packing/storing all of the contents of our home. He said "that should be in there," but when we pointed out that we didn't see it, he said "oh, insurance must have taken that out--I had asked for it originally." So either Leo asked for it and failed to notice that they mistakenly didn't include it, or he forgot to ask for it but didn't want to tell us that. I'm not sure which is worse, but in either case, there was a very obvious $20K item he missed that was only discovered because we reviewed the 40 page insurance estimate in detail. No apology from him either--it was as if we inconvenienced him by discovering his major oversight.
2) Near the end of the claim, we sent Leo a document with ~15 open items we felt needed to be addressed (including pictures and original receipts). Rather than reviewing the details and thoughtfully responding, he replied that our asks were "frivolous" and "ridiculous" and that he no longer wished to continue representing us (and further demanded his payment in full and threatened with imposing late fees if we didn't pay him, despite the claim not being settled yet).
After discontinuing our relationship with Leo, we submitted those same questions directly to the insurance carrier adjuster. After a pleasant 30 minute conversation, they approved 14 of the 15 items (an addl.~$50K).
This made it abundantly clear that Leo was the issue all along. He either didn't understand the details of our claim sufficiently, or was an ineffective communicator with our insurer, or was uninterested in investing the extra time it would take to reach the appropriate settlement and just wanted his "cut" so he could move on to the next.
If you are thinking of hiring Leo, I would strongly suggest either not hiring a public adjuster at all or hiring someone else. Leo was an expensive, ineffective, and frustrating headache, rather than a competent and knowledgeable advocate who made the process easy and fair.
