Houze Stephen A Atty

Steve is a capable attorney who seems to have good relationships with the various opposing counsel, district attorneys, etc. he deals with. The complaint we have, which would lead us not to use him again, or refer to him, is the way he handled client money.
He told us his (very high) hourly rate, and asked for a large check upfront to defend a family member. His told us if the case was settled out of court or if there was a plea agreement he would give back any money not due him, and if the case went to trial he would need an even bigger check, and he would apply any balance from the first check to the trial budget.
Trying to budget for the potential legal costs, after a while, mostly waiting for the grand jury to convene, before we knew which way things were going, plea or trial, we asked Steve to tell us how many hours he had spent on the case. We were shocked that he rebuffed our request, saying if we weren’t happy with his representation he would be glad to refer us to another lawyer. We hadn’t complained at all about his service, and explained we were asking for budgeting reasons. He repeated his offer to refer us out. We experienced this as unprofessional, and suspected his unwillingness to account for his time violated Bar Association Rules of Ethics. His «offer» to refer us to someone else felt like a threat; he knew we didn’t want to, and couldn’t afford to, start all over again with another attorney. As he expected, we didn’t ask again for an accounting.
The family member took a plea deal. Even Steve said it was a very open and shut case. He kept us informed of his conversations with the police and DA, there were no forensics or experts or sleuthing involved, the plea agreement didn’t involve negotiations, it was something the DA outlined and didn’t budge from, we were in court less than 20 minutes, we and his client met with him only once, and we spoke on the phone less than an hour total (we were careful to use our time judiciously); there simply wasn’t a lot of lawyer time required, yet Steve made no move to return any money to us.
We felt like we had a fair idea of how much time he had spent on our case. We made our most generous estimate of his time, times his hourly fee, and then added another 10 hours to make sure we were being fair, and still the amount he took from us was significantly more than the hours we estimated. The problem is that we never knew how much time he put in because he didn’t seem to keep track of his time, or if he did, he never revealed it to us, even when we asked, even when the case was over.
We would have felt better if, instead of misrepresenting to us that he billed on an hourly basis, he’d he said something like, «I charge a flat rate of $ 20,000 for my time on anything that happens short of a trial» («any experts,
be billed to you separately»), which seems to be the case. We could have made an informed decision. Probably a different decision. Instead we were left with a very bad taste in our mouths, that he wasn’t willing to be accountable for his time, and confident that he billed us for more hours than he worked.
I was going to say that Steve might be a good choice for people for whom money is no concern, but I hesitate to say that because the way he dealt with us about money seemed dishonest, which is a problem no matter what your socioeconomic situation is.