Complaint Review: Dr. Ronn / Ron Lavit and Kathy Miholich Personal Review of Services

In my opinion there is no higher priority than co-parenting and communicating effectively for the sake of your children. As a result, when conflicts arise between parents they need to entrust in a parenting coordinator approved by Superior Court that will successfully guide them in a direction with the best interest of their children in mind. After spinning our wheels with Dr. Ronn Lavit’s services  for over a year we finally changed parenting coordinators.  Please understand I really tried  to give Dr. Lavit the benefit of the doubt many times because I believe his heart is in the right place.  He is a good person, humanitarian, and forgot more about the field of psychology than I know, however in my humble opinion he lacks organization, appears flaky at times, and charges what I believe to be an excessive ($240/hour) rate for very mediocre level of service.

NOT A COUNSELOR: Over the year that we saw Dr. Lavit he continually reiterated that he is not a counselor and is a parenting “coordinator.” Fine but logically speaking doesn’t some level of counseling have to go into being a mediator/coordinator?   In any case, he referred Kathy Miholich a woman he shares both his administrative assistant (Lisa) and office space within the same building. After a single session with Kathy Miholich I did not feel comfortable continuing due to a personal conflict of interest.

UNORGANIZATION: His assistant (Lisa) had taken over twenty minutes to find intake paper work for Kathy Miholich. Incidentally I was billed by Kathy for the twenty five minutes in which it took for them to find the “new patient” paperwork and for us to fill it out. I believe that was highly inappropriate, I did not bring it to her attention in order not to get started off on the wrong foot with her. However, in hindsight regret not doing so.

TAKING NOTES: I personally had to ask Dr. Lavit to take notes during our sessions due to having to re-address issues a second time of which he did not record the first time or did not recollect the conversation.  He is against recording coordinating sessions, but will if both parties agree.

EMAIL COMMUNICATION: His assistant (Lisa) is a crass, abrasive and even lacks professionalism at times in both verbal and email communication. She uses cheeky expressions like “Ta” to close emails and even verbally referred to me as “dude” at one point. I have numerous emails from her in which she uses casual informal and colloquial tone as opposed formal English which I believe to be more appropriate form to communicate with clientele.

SCHEDULING DIFFICULTIES: Scheduling appointments was difficult enough to with both parents busy schedules but Lisa made it more complicated due to her flightiness and lack of organization to Dr. Lavit’s schedule. Very often we had to reschedule and already rescheduled appointment which became enormously frustrating.

BREACH OF PRIVATE INFORMATION: His assistant (Lisa) carelessly copied other parties on an email thread that had sensitive credit card information on it, thus necessitating changing credit card numbers.

INCONSIDERATION OF CLIENTS TIME:  Being an animal lover myself I thought nothing of the fact upon my first visit to his office he needed to politely excuse himself to allow his two dogs “Buddy” & “Molly” a bathroom break in between sessions.  Personally, I see nothing wrong with having animals around a work place environment (within reason) but in a discrete and subtle way.  Furthermore, they should never be at the hindrance or at the expense of a client when they already have been sitting in the waiting room five minutes past their scheduled office visit.   After this had happened repeatedly over a number of visits over a year I found it to be excessive and especially unprofessional considering he was billing me for a full hour. I can only remember one occasion he spent extra time (over the hour) but that was due to him looking for patient agreement documentation pertaining to recording sessions.

COURT ORDERED STATUS REPORT TO COURT: For nine months I have tried to obtain a status report that they allegedly his office filed with Superior Court. Although they drafted this critical status report over nine months ago and allegedly (his assistant Lisa) sent it to the court twice I have yet to receive a copy stamped and signed by the court.  After inquiring with his assistant (Lisa) numerous times I was told that it was “taken as a form of harassment” Here we had paid $240/hour for numerous visits over a year and I am considered harassing them by asking his offices for a document that was their responsibility to file with Superior Court. This is was the proverbial “straw that broke the camel’s back” that lead to me taking the time and energy  to post this review.

In closing let me reiterate that I believe Dr. Lavit is a good person that genuinely cares about the well-being of both parties and finding amicable solutions for difficult problems. He is highly knowledgeable in psychology but seems to have reached a laissez faire mentality on running his practice.