EFTA01202382.pdf

December _, 2014 Philip J. Michaels, Esq. Fulbright & Jaworski LLP 666 Fifth Avenue New York, NY 10103-3298 Dear Philip: For more than three years I endured the brutal onslaught of your professional misconduct, punctuated by your persistent indifference to crucial matters affecting my interests in my mother's estate and my father's trust, as well as your total disregard for my personal well-being. You gave my matters the lowest possible priority, regularly claiming that looming tax deadlines or other pressing matters prevented you from even responding to my emails or calls or addressing urgent developments in my case for weeks and even months at a time. Your deliberate and callous disregard of any information, requests or directions I provided to you has wrought substantial damage by allowing my brother to misappropriate funds and withhold payments from me for several years with total impunity. As a result of your shocking misconduct, the funds from my deceased mother and father that I, a 65-year old woman nearing retirement without any other family or external means of support, would rely upon in the coming years have diminished substantially. Moreover, I have been forced to pay not only your singularly undeserved fees that you held over my head in order to get you to provide even a minimal response, but also the fees charged by separate counsel which I was forced to hire to do the work for which you were engaged and for which I had already paid. Under your watch, despite my frequent and repeated warnings about my brother's continued misconduct and substantial irregularities in the administration and accounting of my mother's estate and my father's trust, among other things, it took more than two years after my mother's death for even informal (and highly questionable) accountings to be delivered to me, and my brother was able to misappropriate hundreds of thousands of dollars from my father's trust and my mother's estate, which it appears that he will be unable to restore. EFTA01202382 Philip J. Michaels, Esq. December _, 2014 Page 2 I have pages and pages of emails demonstrating your wholesale abandonment of your professional responsibilities, including numerous emails where I repeatedly urged you to seek explanation from my brother's lawyers about irregularities in the administration of my father's trust or to request explanations and accountings for sporadic payments my brother made (purportedly from my mother's estate) or to get a timeframe for the delivery of long overdue estate tax returns or trust and estate accountings. You took little, if any, of the actions I requested and largely ignored these emails, your prolonged silence requiring me to follow up with you repeatedly for fear of losing any legal rights I may have, as well as the ability to prevent further losses in the trust and the estate. On the rare occasions you did respond, you told me not to worry, that my brother would not be able to steal as he would face jail time if he did so, and that I should seek to get on with my life and resolve matters with my brother as quickly as possible, even for hundreds of thousands of dollars less than my brother has misappropriated and owes me. I have emails aptly demonstrating your outrageous "hands-off' treatment, including your October 15, 2012 email to my assistant in which you asked my assistant to advise you when you can expect to receive the federal and New Jersey estate tax returns from my mother's estate. It is incomprehensible that you would be asking my assistant for the very information that you were engaged to obtain. There is no better evidence that you abandoned your professional responsibilities than the statements made by my brother's counsel, Eric Michaels (ostensibly your adversary) in a March 25, 2013 letter to me transmitting for the first time accountings for my father's trust and my mother's estate: Also note that while we understand you had been represented by Philip Michaels some time ago, we are under the impression that you are not represented by counsel at this time since there has been numerous emails we have either received or been copied on from you which did not come from another counsel. Believing me to be unrepresented by experienced counsel monitoring my brother's conduct and the administration of my mother's estate and my father's trust, clearly both my brother and his counsel felt no urgency in delivering these accountings until more than two years after my mother's death. Moreover, they were clearly unconstrained in attempting to persuade me to approve what you, yourself, acknowledged were "NOT a typical trust or estate accounting" and which raised "a number of questions". Additionally, although we sent those documents to you at the EFTA01202383 Philip J. Michaels, Esq. December _, 2014 Page 3 end of March 2013, by the third week of April 2013 you had still not completed your review, emailing me on April 17, 2013 that you had "almost" completed it and requesting a conference call two days later. This was actually the first time I recall you ever questioning anything in this matter, which is a marked change from your previous advice for me to sign whatever is put in front of me and get on with my life. Presumably it is on the basis of your overriding philosophy "to sign and move on" that you presented me with a $50,000 offer from my brother on December 17, 2013, which you characterized as "a very serious offer." However, as indicated in the several emails I and my advisor sent to you following that offer, you made this recommendation to me without obtaining a full accounting of both the trust and the estate, and verifying whether this was in addition to the money I was still owed from the estate. With the help of new counsel which I was forced to hire as a result of your misconduct, my brother has already agreed to pay substantially in in excess of what you recommended I should accept Unfortunately, however, this is far less than he improperly received from the trust and the estate and, it now appears, that he no longer has the funds to fully restore what he misappropriated. In short, your representation has been at various times indifferent, callous, and non-existent, but at all times entirely unprofessional. It has been both financially and emotionally damaging to me at a very difficult time in my life and amounts to the most egregious sort of malpractice. I would suggest that you review the alarming extent of your misconduct during the course of your representation. If by the end of the year I do not receive a "serious" six-figure proposal from you to repay me for the fees I already wasted on your representation and the losses which I incurred as a result of your misconduct, you should contact your malpractice carrier to prepare for litigation and be prepared to defend a bar complaint. I sincerely hope you will take this opportunity to make amends for the deplorable manner in which you have handled my representation, so that we can move forward amicably in 2015. This is without prejudice to my rights and claims against you and Fulbright & Jaworski LLP, all of which are hereby expressly reserved. Very truly yours, Peggy Siegel. EFTA01202384