Complaint Review: Shapiro Croland Reiser Apfel & Di Iorio LLP

I had an awful experience with Glenn Reiser's representation.

I found there to be a lack of accountability and integrity with him and Shapiro Croland. In my opinion, Mr. Reiser did not show up to our case in the way an attorney of his type of experience would be expected to show up.

When we met with him and his brother Stuart, they said we'd always be in the driver's seat. But instead of driving, it ultimately seemed closer to getting run over. We feIt we got off to a promising start for the first few months, but after that, the momentum took a nosedive and it seemed like we barely had any input at all.

In all fairness, when he took our case over we did have a judge who by his own words was showing partiality to the other side. But after pointing that out, he didn't do anything about it. So we kept being hit with bad rulings and expensive monthly bills for around a year and a half. At the time we were told there was nothing we could do about it. Just wait for the appeal.

He doesn't really seem to know too much about land value outside of his area either with particular circumstances and he made an awful assessment of one of our experts, which turned out to be the opposite of what he said.

Rather than aiming for the best possible scenario for situations that arose he seemed to be repeatedly proud that it wasn't the worst possible outcome.

Then back in a pretrial conference call, the judge verbally approved me to testify virtually because I'm out-of-state but Glenn dragged his feet and never wrote the request that was agreed upon. I had assumed he did this but then 2 months later he forgot completely about it then gave me a hard time that I didn't want to testify in person when I had already received permission to do it virtually. But because he delayed, it cost me more having to come out in person when it was never necessary in the first place.

When driving to court, it appears he charges his actual hourly rate for legal work and not just mileage reimbursement which adds up if the court is in a different county. Mileage/gas and toll reimbursement is actually added on top of this.

There was also wasted time and money with him. One smaller example is his firm ordered video depositions then they forgot they ordered them and they wanted to use the written transcripts instead which were much cheaper and we could've just gone with originally. Again a small example, but it gives you an idea.

He appeared to triangulate the plaintiffs he was representing in our case as well.

Whenever he did something questionable, in my observation he'd do it verbally to one of the plaintiffs. He lied to me about something another plaintiff said which made us make a decision, based on the false information he provided, which boxed us in and we never really recovered from it. Then when I found out what happened from the other plaintiff and called him out on it he didn't tell the truth about what happened.

When I wanted to switch attorneys, I asked for the files of our case. When he responded if digital worked. I replied yes, then he never sent them over. After that it was too late in the case to switch to a better one.

Ironically, he threatened to leave the case close to the last minute when I disagreed with him on some issues because I felt it wasn't being honest.

A lot of the communication with him felt like a manipulation and that I wasn't being told the information directly. In fact, he was so completely wrong some times that by doing the opposite of what he said was the better move. At one point, he admitted, "you were right," to one of the other plaintiffs. However, I wanted my attorney to be right. That's what we hired him for and it made me lose all faith.

I personally found him to be dishonest. And while he definitely is an amazing and expertly skilled trial attorney, he seemed awful at a lot of other aspects of being a lawyer. The worst being negotiating in my and the other main plaintiff's opinion. He felt very draining to be around and deal with. A case that spans over a long period of time is difficult enough but dealing with him just seemed like it added to the burden.