Hartzog & Silva, PLLC - Franklin, TN

If you are suffering from mental health issues as a result of an abusive marriage, & have been diagnosed with ptsd, depression, anxiety, etc., I implore you to not use this attorney. If there is anything about you or your case that isn’t cut-and-dry or easy, she will put you on the back burner but still take your money. Any abuse you have suffered at the hands of your stbx will not matter to this attorney. I was coming out of a psychologically and emotionally abusive marriage. My mental health issues made it hard to get back to work after being a stay-at-home mom for several years. I was essentially broken, but still needing help moving forward with my divorce. After our second in-person meeting, I was made to feel as if my mental health issues were a burden to her and that she wasn’t experienced in working with clients that have been diagnosed with depression, ptsd, etc. Besides my ex-husband, I have never had another individual make me feel as ashamed about my mental health issues as this attorney did. Overall, Amanda treated my case as if it were unimportant. Weeks would go by with zero correspondence. After failing to communicate critical correspondence between opposing council & myself, which resulted in an expensive and pointless mediation, Amanda flat refused to take accountability for her negligence. When asked point blank why she dropped the ball in my case, she resorted to blame shifting by telling me that she was “hesitant to take my case to begin with because she didn’t think i would listen” (to her). She was specifically referring to the fact that i couldn’t immediately find gainful employment. Had she listened to me or agreed to talk to my mental health providers as I’d suggested numerous times, she might have understood the challenges that I was facing. She might have been able to grasp that you just can’t “shake off” debilitating depression, anxiety & ptsd. None of this mattered to her. I spent about 10k with her firm and absolutely nothing moved forward in my case. She will overcharge & pad your bill. You will send emails with important information, receive zero reply, but still get charged. Among other things, I was also told by Amanda that the assigned judge in our case “isn’t going to care if your daughter is lgbtq”. I was told the judge “Isn’t going to care about your husband’s sexual addiction” (& how it has effected me & my daughter). I was told our judge would “chew me a new one for being unemployed”. It was like being told to fit a mold or you won’t stand a chance with this judge. Backstory: my daughter spent a week in a mental hospital due to the issues she was experiencing in middle school at that time. She ultimately made me feel helpless, stupid & the entire experience was retraumatizing. In the end, I had to ask several times for my case file (which completely tracks)

Whatever you do, do not use Laurie Parker to do a Trust. If you do, this is what you can expect. You will pay a large retainer fee before anything is ever initiated (mine was $3000). Then you will be in a several month process with you attempting repeatedly to get Laurie to return your calls & emails. You will finally have to contact her staff to ever get her to follow up with you. There will be so much time elapsed between discussions that Laurie can't even remember what you discussed previously. She will claim that she is too busy and overwhelmed, she will lie & tell you that she sent you emails when she doesn't & that they are having server problems is why she didn't respond to your emails. By the time we got done we had so little confidence in the final product that we just went to a new attorney and basically got absolutely nothing but a great deal of frustration and disappointment from the experience with Laurie … $3000 completely down the drain! Do yourself a favor & find someone competent who will do a Trust in a couple weeks & at a third of the cost of Laurie. She way over complicates the process and honestly does not know what she is doing. If you could give a -0- Star review, that is what she would get from my wife & I.

I had a fairly simple case, being that my ex husband (also a lawyer so should know better) quit paying child support. She never kept me informed of correspondence, filings, documents received or in my case, never received, and failed to respond in a timely manner. On top of that, we were in a settlement negotiation and she never got back to me on whether my ex would agree to settle for the amount I offered. She just never got back to me and completely dropped the ball on it! She ran my bills up an extraordinary amount, with no results. She is apparently an attorney who got her license and decides when it is convenient for her to practice law and has zero concern for her clients. I paid her for a year and a half, with zero results even though it should have been resolved promptly. It is the law to pay child support, but for some reason she did nothing! She was not confident, and made promises she never followed through with. I wasted an enormous amount of time, money and patience waiting for her to do the right thing. Please look elsewhere.