Armstrong Meakings — Lawyer in Barrie

Reviews of Armstrong Meakings

• Charles

  Added 2014.02.09

  I used Jack Armstrong's services back in 2010. My wife left me with 2 small kids and demanded a separation agreement be made. I found a free separation agreement template using Google that was written by a lawyer and claimed it was good and legal. I downloaded it and hashed out an agreement with my hostile wife. I brought to Jack Armstrong for review and counsel and he told me it wasn't worth the paper it was written on and that it wasn't legal. Not knowing any better, I asked him to compose one for me using the agreement I'd made as a guide for the wishes of me and my wife (now ex-wife). His legal secretary emailed a PDF scan of an agreement that was identical in content (just slightly different formatting) to what I'd created from the downloaded template with only a few differences. Primarily the child support section was changed to be in compliance with the Federal Government's requirements. I was so mad. All Mr. Armstrong had to do was tell me that the child support section wasn't compliant with federal law and I'd have been able to look that up and fix that section. Instead he made it sound like the entire agreement was crap. Also there were 4 other errors made in the document that his legal secretary sent to me. I emailed back details of the errors and what needed to be corrected. I received a revised document with only 1 error fixed and the other 3 still present. I then had to reply pointing out the 3 errors still present. Again, a new agreement with 1 error fixed and 2 still outstanding. This game continued until there still 1 error outstanding. I received an interim bill and saw that I was being billed for every email, every document revision, etc., so I could see the game that was being played. The document sent to me was a scanned PDFs so it couldn't be edited, and back then there wasn't OCR capability in Acrobat or MS-Word converters, so only the lawyer could fix the errors in the document. So I got smart. I spent a weekend making an MS-Word Document that was identical in format and content to the PDF version, fixed all the errors to my satisfaction, got the agreement signed with witnesses everything was done and legal. Learn from my mistakes and don't get burned by lawyers. A couple years later when I filed for divorce - I used a different lawyer. She was good, but I saved myself a lot of money with her as well by doing most of the work myself. They say "marriage is grand and divorce is 50 grand", but it doesn't have to cost you anywhere near that much if you're careful and frugal.