“I Would Absolutely Recommend Adam Leitman Bailey, P.C.”
Liz Scheier:
Hi, my name is Lis Scheier. I recently was caught up in an eviction proceedings for my mother who was living in her own apartment. Although I hadn’t lived in that apartment for many, many years, I was still listed on the lease and was therefore the only non-judgement proof of person living in the apartment. So my big concern was that I would end up being responsible for all the back rents, all the fees, creating giant amount of money right when I was in the middle of my pregnancy with my second child and a new job. So that was pretty scary.
I didn’t originally know that I was being sued. The eviction notice went to my mother’s apartment where I obviously don’t live. So it was a good year into the case before I knew I was named as someone in the case at all. By the time I found out, the case was obviously gone quite a bit down the road, it was pretty advanced –- so when I called Dov Treiman at Adam Leitman Bailey, it was, it suddenly became an emergency for them, which I wasn’t expecting to be. And I really appreciated the quick response and everyone jumping on the case to help me out.
I worked with Dov Treiman and Jamie Friedland.
I had received his name from a friend who worked with him, another landlord-tenant attorney who worked with him many, many years ago and had very nice things to say about him.
My experience working with Adam Leitman Bailey was wonderful. All attorneys were very responsive, very helpful, really spelled out a lot of the issues involved in the case in in lay-persons terms which is very helpful for non-lawyer. I know from the lawyers perspective this all seems in a day work but for someone being sued for the first time, it was very terrifying. It was really great to get answers to all my questions that were figurative and substantive and, of course, to ultimately have the case go positively for me.
The attorneys negotiated a deal with the Landlord whereby I relinquished my rights to the lease and my succession rights to the lease in exchange to being taken off the lease. It was very much of a surprise to me to be named in the case at all as I haven’t lived in that building since the 1990s. So it was, I was… very much shocked to find out that I was not only on that lease but being expected to pay –- I think the legal fees would have come to about $60 to $70,000 –. So I’ve still never seen the paper work so I still don’t know the originals filed – I think it was about 8 or 10 months into the process that somebody finally called me to let me know I was named on this case. That was in about August, I think, and then the case went to court in October.
My mother moved into that apartment in the early 80s and she had me on the lease at that time. I think that my name was just never taken off the lease, so it may just have been a paperwork situation –they looked at the lease and put the names that were on it. As I put it to Dov – of all the twenty-four hour door men there, not one of them could pick me out of a line up. So it was pretty clear that I wasn’t living in the building.
I was very reassured that the attorneys were there to help me and I appreciated the monthly updates on the fees that were coming up, and also on Dov’s careful attention to the time that was being put into it and ensuring that that time didn’t get run up unnecessarily, that made me feel like I was in good hands. It was one of those cases where there was just not a lot going on until the very end. So we had most contact in the beginning when I was explaining the details of what I think maybe a little bit of an odd case, and in the days leading up to the case itself I spoke with Jamie quite a few times.
I would absolutely recommend Adam Leitman Bailey, P.C.