Premier Paralegal-Unprofessional and incompetent. I retained the services of Premier Paralegal to assist with an independent adoption. We worked only with Dora Fortino. There were many mistakes and typos on the paperwork she completed and filed with the court. The adpot-200 form alone was filed once, and refiled twice more times due to her errors. Multiple documents had sections hand-written in and several documents had white out. The court may accept this, but I found it unprofessional due to the money we spent. Dora provided me with one document with a file stamp from the court. She later provided me with a copy of the same document, except the original court file stamp had been covered in white out and the document had a new court stamp with a new date. I asked her why and she said she didn't know. She got us a court date of June 1st, but the document served to the bio parent stated June 10th. The proof of service for one bio parent and the proof of a newspaper posting had not been filed with the court prior to our court date, which ended up not mattering since the dates were wrong, and the background investigation by social services wasn't done and filed yet, so we couldn't proceed anyway. Dora told us the June 1st court date was wrong, and that we didn't need to go to court until June 10th. Thank god the court clerk called us May 31st to discuss why all the paperwork was wrong or missing and told us to come June 1st anyway to ask for a continuance, otherwise we would have been a no show to our own hearing! I was told I would get a due diligence report of all the actions taken by her process server, a list of times and dates of all the actions they had taken to try and locate or try to locate the second bio- parent. I asked for it several times prior to court and she then said it wasn't needed due to a newspaper ad being used instead of personal service. Since I had paid for the process server up front and she said they had searched for the bio-parent, I requested a copy of due diligence anyway for my own records. All she would provide to me was a screenshot of a text or facebook message that she had sent to the bio-parents dad, asking for his address. She blamed the court itself for writing the wrong date on the form that she then had had served and denied any responsibility she had to verify the information prior to serving it, since it was in conflict with the court dates she had on other documents. She said none of the other docs were filed timely because the court wrote the wrong date (on only one document, and all others showed the correct June 1st date). She blamed social services for not filing the background investigation, and blamed them for delaying the report, even though I had told her, both verbally and in writing, that their process takes a minimum of 6 months and I kept asking her, why are we going to court before the investigation was completed? For these reasons I asked for a refund, since she had failed to provide the services she was paid for. She said absolutely not and I replied that I would have to contact the BBB and post a review. She became irate, yelling at me that I was threatening her, that this is what I do, I run around having her complete all this work and then once it was done, demanded a refund because I no longer needed her help and could finish on my own. She said she felt sorry for my child. I believe she continued to berate me, but at that point, I just hung up. If you would like further evidence you may contact me via email at scrabble34@gmail.com. I can provide you with screen shots of evidence supporting all claims and a voicemail from the court stating all the errors as well. I'm not providing them here due to privacy issues. read more
