Erika Carter - Denver, CO

I hired Harris Family Law in 2022 to help with what was clearly going to be a very contentious divorce. I was impressed that they were a well respected and well reviewed law firm. However; I have come to see hiring them as one of the biggest mistakes of my life. They steered me towards higher conflict, worse results and outrageous fees. I have paid Harris Family Law more than $70,000 to achieve a resolution that my ex offered on our first day of mediation. Here is some of how it played out. I was matched with Kelley Cleveland who “specialized” in divorces with young children. She pretty quickly took herself off the case because it was too contentious and she’d made some pretty big mistakes already. Erika Carter came in as a person who “specialized” in high conflict divorces. At first I was impressed that she seemed organized, meticulous and was making clear recommendations for what I should/shouldn't do. She advised me to borrow money from family members to avoid selling assets which could be contested. Then when I told her I couldn't borrow more she reversed her advice and encouraged me to sell marital assets, this was the first red flag. She made countless mistakes, gave terrible advice and took zero responsibility for any of it. She advised me to agree to less than 50-50 parenting time which then created a months long uphill battle just to get back to 50-50. When I raised concerns about agreeing to this at the time she told me the wording of the agreement protected me and it was what I needed to do to move things along. When I asked her about it again months later, she said that provision was “just fluff” and didn’t carry any weight. There was one point during a hearing where the judge read the wrong number for my wife's salary, lower by about $15K putting me on the hook for more alimony. I pointed that out to Erika and she asked the judge to repeat the number, but did not point out the mistake or attempt to correct it. She neither apologized nor explained her reasoning afterward. I learned later that there is a rule 59 motion that we could have used to correct the issue but she didn’t mention that as an option and the mistake went uncorrected. I complained to her and her boss, Katy Ellis who is a partner at Harris Family Law, she simply said if I didn't trust Erika I could go hire a new law firm. My case was in flight and we all knew that it would have been very expensive to start over with a new firm, though it was an option I should have taken. Every billing cycle I was being charged thousands of dollars. In one particularly egregious case I was billed for two hours of time to download a file. When I questioned this I was told I had a very good legal team (Does that sound like an answer to you?). There were other times where I was confused about why she was spending so much time on my case (and achieving such poor results). There were lots of documents passed back and forth and it turns out Erika did not know how to use a feature to automatically highlight differences between two documents. She was spending hours re-reading the same document. This was expensive and error prone, but only a problem for me. It led to her telling me that things were in agreements that were not. When I complained about this she simply said I signed the docs and again took zero responsibility. Erika is very polite, well spoken and said lots of supportive things to me during the course of my divorce; however, she is an awful lawyer who should not be trusted with your case. Everything I’ve mentioned here, I’ve talked about at length with her other staff and partners at Harris Family Law. They have given me responses that are factually and materially incorrect and have said that is the best they can do. Maybe they’re right.