Adam Farkas, a partner in the law practice of Farkas & Crowley of West Palm Beach, Florida, explains why they decided to add family law to their practice following multiple requests from clients in need of help with family court.
Both attorneys, Adam Farkas and Jacqueline Crowley, have considerable experience and strong legal backgrounds. Together they serve their clients in both criminal defense and family law cases. As Jacqueline says, you are getting two lawyers for the price of one.
Transcript:
For the first five to seven years, we only did criminal, completely. We were starting to get more calls about horrible things that were happening in family court to our clients who we had or their family members. There were horrific stories about what the lawyers did to them or what – a lot of it I couldn’t believe, but then, when I started to see the quantity of lawyers that were just taking advantage of clients – they’re vulnerable in family law. You guys come to us, and it’s one of the biggest issues in your life that you’re going to go through, a divorce or a child custody. It’s your family. It’s the second most important thing to your freedom.
When I started to see how terrible it was, we decided to start helping clients, and we started getting more and more clients to the point where we were helping them when DCF was trying to take their kids away from them, or a really vicious lawyer was trying to take advantage of somebody who can’t afford $10,000 for a lawyer or $15,000 for a lawyer. You should understand, in family law, if it’s not the government, you’re not entitled to a lawyer. It’s not like people get – go in there and a lawyer’s going to help you in a divorce with your husband who has the money or your ex-spouse who could afford it and you can’t. What we try to do is we try to figure out a way where we could help them. We’re keeping our cost much lower, so we brought in a special paralegal. Her hourly rate is way lower, but also, what we did was we saw how much easier it would be if one party would be reasonable and have client control.
Florida has very specific statutory guidelines for child custody, child support, time sharing. It’s pretty much statutory, so if two attorneys are reasonable, there’s no reason why the case shouldn’t be easily worked out in mediation. However, attorneys totally go off the end telling their clients that they can get this and that when they know they’re never going to get it. We end up doing mediation and deliberating and going back and forth to court for 12, 18 months, and all we are doing as lawyers is taking the food from the children. We don’t do that. Even when they start asking for attorney’s fees and they say, well, I have $43,000 in attorney’s fees and – so they ask our client, well, what have you paid your attorney? Our client’s like, well, I think $11,000 or 12.
We’ve allowed them to get good representation for a fair value of what our hourly rates can work. The attorneys are still terrible, but at least we have grown it so much that we feel like we’re at least helping our clients get through it without losing their home and losing their ability to pay for their groceries while their family law case is going on and don’t add to their stress. That’s why we really added it to our firm.
