I had the most negative, life-altering, nightmare experience imaginable by deciding to hire this firm to represent me in a defamation case from 2016 to 2018. It was so outrageous, that I wrote and published an entire book about my experience, titled Minority Viewpoint, which is available on my website authorsumi.com.
In looking over both Google and Yelp reviews of this firm by many other former clients who concur with my general observations, I must say I fully agree with and validate the reviews on this firm published by individuals Alex Schatz, Dean Badgley, Michelle Bell, William Dabrowski, T.L., Troy P., Ben A., Kent R., Rebecca H., Christine L., and Sue K.... to name a few. Their reviews on this firm are all worth checking out on Google and Yelp along with mine.
My advice to all reading this is you better really, really, really be absolutely certain of who you hire in a legal case, because if you feel screwed over in the end there is no remedy for you after the fact.
By then it's already far too late, as it was for me. And the lawyers are keenly aware of their great advantage over us in this respect, though I was not.
The lawyer from this firm who I hired was Brian Niemczyk. I made the mistake of trusting him for a defamation matter, because he had helped me previously in an unemployment law related issue many years prior. Looking back now, I should have done far better research and selected different representation for the defamation case. Even though Brian and his higher ups at the firm had assured me in writing at the start that I had "a good claim" of defamation against the party I was suing, I lost the case in summary judgment as well as after a subsequent appeal of that ruling to a higher court. My dad and I spent close to $120,000 from our retirement funds, all for nothing and primarily to line the pockets of Brian and his firm.
Full details are given in my book, Minority Viewpoint, but my basic issues about Brian's representation in the defamation case involve three area: 1) horrendously inaccurate cost estimates, telling us at start the full case would cost about only $60,000; 2) no information provided in beginning about the almost certain possibility of a summary judgment motion/challenge by the defense (instead he warned us only and continuously about the risk of an ANTI-SLAPP motion by defense which never happened but no warning ever about summary judgment motion and the high costs/risks involved for us as plaintiffs; 3) since he never told us there was a summary judgment motion to worry about that could dismiss our case before trial, he also never told us that we needed to collect ample evidence to demonstrate legal "malice" in order to overcome the qualified privilege awarded to the party I was suing and thereby to survive the almost certain summary judgment challenge by the defense. He also didn't take nearly as many depositions as necessary to try and find that evidence of malice to survive the huge summary judgment challenge.
After fully losing after two years and almost $120,000 entirely wasted, my dad and I spoke to big boss Chad Johnson of Hellmuth & Johnson to talk about our dissatisfaction as their loyal customers for the past two years. Remarkably our experience with Chad literally mirrored - word for word - what was published in a review by an individual and fellow former Hellmuth & Johnson client named Ben A., who stated the following: "When I brought this up to chad Johnson, the managing partner to hopefully just get a simple apology, he acted like a complete jerk and refused to take responsibility for their opportunistic business model." read more