Complaint Review: Robert F. French - Truckee California

My husband and I hired Robert French in October of 2009 to provide legal advice for a claim against Valley of California, AKA Coldwell Banker for non-disclosure.

Robert French identified the valuation of this litigation to be over $1,000,000 and proceeded accordingly.  When we met with Robert French, we told him that we had met with several other attorneys and one advised that our claim would be only would a $100,000 at best and since there was not a legal fee provision in our real estate contract, it may not be worth the legal fees to litigate against Coldwell Banker.

Robert French made a substantial error in not indentifying the date of fraud, which corresponds to the date used by an expert in the real estate appraisal field to assess damages.  Robert French thought it was the date that the improvements in our real property occured or over $6,000,000 in valuation.  The real legal date of fraud is the date the real estate was purchased, that valuation was only $1,575,000 at that time--a material difference. 

When a professional real estate appraiser assesses dimuintion of value, they assign a percentage of the valuation to determine damages.  In our case, the date of fraud or purchase price date was much, much less than the completed value, reflecting significant impovements to the property.  Therefore Robert French was chasing, until the very end, a valuation date that was completely wrong.

Robert French spent needless and excessive billable hours pursuing a valuation that was completely wrong--this is a black and white area, not grey as much of the law is.   An example:   Bob French took 4 hours for deposition prep for a deposition that only took 40 minutes for myself and 20 minutes for my husband.  We were baffled why so much billable time was spent in prep.

When Bob French finally found out from the real estate appraiser expert witness that his date was wrong, he called us.  This occured 4 days before the settlement conference with Coldwell Banker and two weeks before the trial was scheduled to commence.  We were stunned.

Basically, the original lawyer who informed us that our case would be worth only $100,000 was right, that is exactly what we got and it went directly to our lender.  We spent in excess of $70,000 in legal fees and other fees, not to mention going through the process which is debilitating. 

If Robert French had concurred with the original opinion of the other attorney, we would have never proceeded as we did not get the proceeds.  Our interest was to pursue a much larger award for the effort and costs. 

We feel that Robert French identified us as high net worth individuals, capable of paying his fees which we did until the end. 

Robert French says we owe him $11,000 in fees, he took us to mediation where the mediator said that he was arrogant and wrong in the law.  He would not settle.  He then took us to arbitration in front of the Placer County Bar Association where the arbitrator, Bob Sinclair told Robert French that he was wrong, the outcome of that arbitration is still pending.

Robert French is unreasonable, fee generating and should be avoided.  There are many other attorneys in need of business.   We have one, (((competitor's name redacted))) in Auburn who is amazing, empathetic and not at all like Robert French.  I am available to talk at (((phone number redacted))) if you are considering hiring Robert French for any litigation.

CLICK here to see why Rip-off Report, as a matter of policy, deleted either a phone number, link or e-mail address from this Report. sorry, allowing you to give a competitors name would instigate others to just file against their competition, to only come back later to suggest their company, ..plus, if you post a competitors name more than likely they will show up on search engines as a Rip-off! - - your comments on this policy are welcome.

CLICK here to see why Rip-off Report, as a matter of policy, deleted either a phone number, link or e-mail address from this Report. In this case we removed an alleged competitors name