My wife and I were first-time home buyers and used the Law Offices of Scott D. Kriss when buying our house. The transaction was a short sale, and began with the offer and purchase & sale agreement, followed by approximately 6 months of waiting for approval, followed by 3-4 weeks of additional negotiation, and finally the closing. Overall our experience using this law firm was poor. I will highlight a couple of our experiences:
1) The purchase and sale agreement was obviously drafted too quickly and without any sort of proofreading. There were many spelling mistakes, our current address was incorrect, and the total purchase price was wrong by a factor of 1,000 ($233 million instead of $233,000 -- ouch!). We brought it to the attention of Attorney Kriss and he first suggested that we cross out all of the mistakes and write in the corrections, but on the advice of our real estate agent we asked him to re-write the agreement. After everything was worked out, he apologized and offered to waive his fee for the preparation of this document. We were pleased with this resolution and took him at his word that there would be no further complications.
2) Fast forward 6 months. After we (me, my wife, and Attorney Kriss) negotiated the offer a bit with the seller's bank & attorney, we settled on a new purchase price that everyone was pleased with, and the seller's bank gave final approval on the deal. The closing documents were prepared. Our mortgage broker got the HUD settlement statement to the attorneys' office with 3 full business days to go before the closing. The attorney was supposed to add all of the additional fees and produce a final HUD statement. We were anxious to review this document given the history with the purchase & sale agreement -- we wanted to make sure everything on this form was correct.
We finally received the HUD statement from the attorney the around 6:00PM the night before the closing was scheduled to happen. The purchase price was again incorrect; it showed the original price we offered, not the revised price agreed upon with the bank, and the property tax figures were calculated incorrectly. I attempted without success to get a hold of Scott Kriss that evening and instead spent a while on the phone with our mortgage broker who graciously offered to help me decipher what was wrong with the statement.
We discovered that our mortgage broker was not aware of the "new" purchase price (which had actually been finalized weeks before), because the broker would have needed us to sign a revised contract reflecting this new price, and we had not -- everything was agreed upon via email. Not recognizing or informing us of the need to sign a new contract was a serious oversight on our attorney's part (especially for one who claims to specialize in short sales), and once we realized the issue we had to sign a new contract with the sellers and scramble to get our bank to re-approve our loan at the new price. This issue would have been much easier to identify and resolve if we had received the HUD earlier (even earlier that day, and that would have still given the law firm 2 business days to prepare it).
The closing had been scheduled for the following day. We didn't receive the revised and corrected HUD statement for review until after 3PM, which was less than two hours before the closing. We discovered during the closing that there was an item omitted from this corrected HUD: payment to the seller for heating oil still in the tank. We were surprised with this charge at the closing and had to mail a personal check the following day to cover it.
I will say that there was a pleasant surprise: at the closing the attorney gave us half of his fee as a credit. It was a small gesture but it did do a lot to smooth things over at the time.
Additionally, we found the following things to be true throughout the transaction:
* It was difficult to keep in touch with any single person about our transaction. This is somewhat understandable given the length of our transaction (~7 months start to finish), but it seemed that even in the final days before the closing, we were told each day that someone different would be handling things. The attorney present at our closing was someone I had never met or interacted with before that day and he understandably had no knowledge of the prior difficulties we had encountered with our transaction.
* Scott Kriss would not return phone calls. When he was in his office (which was rarely) I could typically reach him at his desk phone, but I asked him a dozen or more times via email to call me and I never once got a call back. On one occasion he did reply to one of my emails and told me he'd call me the following morning, but he never did; I had to call him.
I would not recommend the Law Offices of Scott D. Kriss. If you use their services, anticipate having to review everything they produce and staying on top of them to get things done in a timely manner. read more
