8 Months of Waiting and How Jaime Roriz Law Firm Bullied Me for a Negative Review

On November 18, 2022, I went to see the lawyer Marta Couto from Jaime Roriz’s law firm.

It was the first law firm that came up on Google and since they gave me the appointment quickly, I decided to give it a try. I paid 79.95 euros for a half-hour consultation.

We had agreed that the lawyer would send me an estimate of what the expenses would be to prepare the action and take it to court; In addition, she would inform me if it could be paid in monthly installments.

We decided to make the effort to pay a lawyer only because Marta Couto told us that we could request 50,000 euros in compensation. After 8 months, we realized that this was not true.

She never sent me the estimated budget and on November 20 I sent her all the documentation; Two days later, she replied that she had no idea that we were going to count on her services.

I also told her that I was waiting for her to send me the estimated budget and she told me no, that she had already explained that she could not make an estimate since it was paid for hours worked.

Although I knew that I was not the one who had given the wrong information, I decided to let it go.

Here I was in a great hurry to go to court and receive the supposed compensation to have money to legalize the house.

Since before filing the action in court you must send letters to try to resolve the situation peacefully, I told Marta Couto to proceed to send the interpellation letters as soon as possible.

Just in those days we received the complaint from the scammer João Valente, so responding to the Magistrate’s Court was a priority.

On November 23, we signed the forensic attorney’s document and transferred 307.50 euros so that she could respond to the Magistrate’s Court.

On November 30, Marta wrote to me to resend the signed forensic procurement document because she couldn’t find it.

On December 2, she sent the response to the Magistrate’s Court.

I was happy because it seemed to me that the document was well done, and it was clear that the notary was corrupt and a swindler.

In theory, on December 15 we had the premediation appointment in the Magistrate’s Court and since we had to be accompanied by the lawyer, we had to pay a provision of 184 euros because if not, she could not move from her office.

In the end, João Valente’s lawyer called mine and they said they didn’t want to reach an agreement, so the case was going to trial.

On December 26, they responded from Social Security requesting new documentation regarding the request for judicial support. I answer this because if Marta Couto did it, it would cost me 200 euros more.

From then on, the lawyer disappears for a whole month, and I continue to send a weekly update of the documentation, since I was making claims all over, I always had new things to attach to the case.

It was supposed that as soon as she responded to the Magistrate’s Court, she was going to prepare the interpellation letters.

Since she hadn’t even responded to my emails for a month, we thought she had been fired or even died.

I sent a contact request through the website to see if Marta Couto was still working at Jaime Roriz’s law firm.

On January 26, the lawyer sends me an email with very bad manners in which she writes:

“Good afternoon, Erika, today I return to your presence. In previous emails I told you that I cannot always respond on time due to the volume of work”

It is one thing that she cannot respond immediately, and another thing is that she disappears for a month. If you’re so busy that it takes a month to reply to an email, perhaps the law firm is taking on more clients than it can actually handle.

That same day she also told me that next week she was going to send the interpellation letters.

This was a lie, since, from there, she disappeared again.

On February 1, after paying the monthly payment of 150 euros, I told her that I had been summoned in court to testify about the complaint that I had filed with the police and that since my complaint was already in court, she must elaborate the action to attach to the process that was already in court.

That is, the lawyer had almost 3 months from that moment to prepare the action.

Since she has been missing again since January 26, I wrote again on February 27 to tell her that at that point (4 months from the first consultation) she had not even sent the interpellation letters and to ask her if she was capable or not of doing the job, if not to notify me to look for another lawyer.

She responded by apologizing because “She had a lot of work.”

She disappears again and on March 6 I write again to tell her that I am still waiting for the interpellation letters that she had promised on January 26.

On March 7th I sent the same email again.

On March 8, she appears and apologizes once again because she has a lot of work and processes that have more urgency and priority than mine. Here she begins to send the interpellation letters for me to review.

On March 10 she sent the letters.

Do the calculations of how long it took Marta Couto to send 4 interpellation letters. Four letters that were practically the same.

Logically, I continued to pay the monthly even though she appeared from month to month.

Between March 13 and 21, we received the answers to the interpellation letters, and as expected, everyone blamed each other so as not to assume responsibility.

On March 24, I write to the lawyer again to say that the 10-day period has passed and that she please prepares the action since there is only one month left for me to testify in court.

Only on March 29 did it occur to her to request legal support for the action for the scam.

On April 24, when there were 3 days left before I went to testify in court, I wrote to Marta Couto to see if the action was ready.

Once again, she replies that she has a lot of work and that she didn’t have time. As you can see in the emails, she was always working against the clock in processes with deadlines about to expire.

On May 1, after religiously pay the monthly fee, I informed her that the person who had to attend to me was on strike and that they would call me for another date.

I must emphasize that, from here on, the excuse for not doing their job was that “until there was a response to judicial support, the action could not be filed in court.”

If she knew this, why hadn’t she applied for judicial support before?

On May 8 I realized that they sent me two invoices for the last two amounts paid and I sent an email because if they are issuing an invoice for each payment, I am missing invoices. Since I had only received the last two invoices for 150 euros, I asked for all the rest.

On May 11, I sent the same email with a copy to the lawyer who replied that she doesn’t know anything and that I should write to the accountant.

On May 18, since no one has responded or sent me the invoices, I wrote for the third time to request that all invoices be sent by email. I also sent the message through the contact page and Facebook.

In the email it said the following:

“Good afternoon,

I am writing to you for the third time to request my invoices to be sent.

I wrote for the first time on May 8 and for the second time on May 11, without anyone bothering to reply.

On May 11, I asked for the account statement, and they did answer to that email.

So far, I have paid 1091.5 euros and 7 months later I find out that I have nothing, and I am even worse than before: scammed, without legal action and with 1091.5 euros less.

I am not a millionaire and the amount I have paid so far has meant a very important financial effort for me and my boyfriend.

The least I ask is that you treat me with respect and dignity.

I have been patient because I understand that my lawyer had more important issues to deal with during these 7 months, but what seems unacceptable to me is that nobody deigns to answer when I ask for my invoices. Invoices that legally should have been issued automatically once payments have been made.

It seems to me a total lack of respect and a shame that nobody sends the invoices when I am paying dearly for the answer to each email.

I searched for a large law firm precisely to make sure that the people assisting me were professional and responsible. Not to must send the same email a third time, since no one has deigned to answer.

Of the 1091.5 euros paid, they only sent me 2 invoices of 150 euros each. What happened to the rest of the bills?

Apart from the emotional and psychological exhaustion that being scammed meant for me, making the effort to pay a lawyer only with the hope of being able to recover the money and time lost, being 7 months later still without the lawsuit, and still having to waste time with this.

Thanks again to the accounting manager for sending me the invoices.“

That same night they sent the invoices at 10pm.

I imagine that the message reached the boss and that is why the accountant finally had the decency to send the documents.

At this point, I was tired of waiting for the lawyer to elaborate the legal action, of the fortune that it was costing me just to have them respond to my emails, and of the exorbitant prices that I had paid for the simple procedures that she had done until now.

As of May 2023, I had already paid 1,150 euros and she had not even prepared the action for the court. How many more thousands of euros and how many more months would I have to wait?

The excuse now was that we had to wait for the response of judicial support. Why did she wait until March 29 to request it? She could have done it in December 2022.

It is not that the lawyer already had the action ready to introduce in court as soon as they accepted judicial support. No, at that point she had done absolutely nothing. As you saw in the emails, she was always working against the clock in processes with deadlines about to expire.

On June 1, already exhausted from waiting, I left a negative review in the hope that someone would take an interest in doing the job right.

The review said:

“I hope I can change my opinion in the future and give a positive review.

I was scammed by Remax Rubeas when I bought a house in September 2022.

To this day, I have been waiting for my lawyer to do the action for the court. 8 months that I waited and paid religiously every month. 1150 euros paid so far, of which I only have less than 300 euros as a credit balance and the action has not even been carried out.

Also, I had to email everyone three times so they could send me the invoices because they were ignoring me.

I sincerely hope that my review helps improve the services provided.”

At 10 p.m. someone who was allegedly Jaime Roriz wrote to me (I say allegedly because I never gave him my phone number or authorized him to write to me on WhatsApp) to threaten me with a complaint for the “falsehood” that I had placed in the reviews.

My thought was “Another gangster.”

My answer was:

“Good evening, dear Mr. Jaime Roriz,

First of all, at no time did I say that the invoices had not been issued, but I sent three emails for them to reply and send me the invoices that haven’t been sent yet, because up to that moment they had only sent two invoices.

If you say they were already sent, I didn’t receive them. It costs nothing to simply reply to the email and send them.

Replying to an email is simply being courteous and cordial.

I leave my comment as constructive criticism to help your business improve.

As I said in the review and about which you mentioned nothing, I have been waiting for 8 months for the lawyer to prepare the action. Something that seems excessive to me.

I also believe that we all have freedom of speech to share our experiences and you also have freedom of speech to respond to the review with your opinion.

My intention was simply to improve the service provided.

I also think that you should be the most interested in the service that is given to customers.

Anyway, don’t worry, I already deleted the review out of fear of you and your threats.

I appreciate the time you took to write to me, it’s a shame it wasn’t for the right reasons.

I wish you good night and good health.”

It is very serious that a supposed lawyer violates my intimacy and my privacy by writing to me on WhatsApp at 10pm when I don’t even know him, nor have I given him my phone number or authorized him to contact me. Also, that he did not do it out of concern for the service provided by his office in Porto, but rather to threaten and intimidate; an attitude that I would expect from a criminal and not from a lawyer.

Immediately writes Marta Couto, who was not worried because I had been waiting for 8 months for her to deign to do the action, but because “I questioned her work.”

In this email that she sent me, she copied Jaime Roriz, who was surely ignorant and unaware of the various emails in which she apologized because she had a lot of work.

On June 2, I wrote an email in the morning and then again in the afternoon to Sara Filipa, who is supposedly the CFO, asking them to return the amount that was left in my account because I was going to look for another lawyer.

On June 5 I wrote to Marta Couto since Sara Filipa had not bothered to respond.

Marta said that “she doesn’t understand why I’m changing lawyers.”

That same day Sara Filipa proceeds to return the money and confirm the cancellation of my account.

Jaime Roriz even sent me the receipt via WhatsApp when he shouldn’t be sending anything. This is how incompetent the CFO is, that the “boss” must be sending the bank receipt directly to the client.

On June 7, 9 and 12, I received 3 more emails from this office in which they reported fees for some activity carried out. Shouldn’t they have canceled my data from the system? Why did I keep getting emails?

That is how disastrous the operation of this law firm is.

This is how my relationship with Jaime Roriz’s law firm ends after losing 8 months and having thrown 903.89 euros in the trash.

When I went to consult with other lawyers, I realized that the information that Marta Couto had given us was not correct.

Marta Couto had told us that we could request 50,000 euros in compensation, and it was not true. They explained to us that, in order to request patrimonial damages, we had to have already legalized the house and pay everything that had to be paid. You couldn’t go to court to ask for money from the air.

Only after having done everything and having the invoices was it possible to really account for the money that was going to be requested for patrimonial and non-patrimonial damages.

In addition, you cannot ask for so much money for moral damages either because that depends on the sensitivity of the judge and in Portugal, it is not given much value.

The lawyers with whom I consulted charged for preparing the action and everything was included there: sending emails, WhatsApp, accompaniment in court.

At Jaime Roriz’s law firm, they charged me for every email and every second the lawyer thought of me. In fact, the answer to every email cost me almost 4 euros.

Another important thing is that I did not even have this lawyer’s phone number and the other lawyers I consulted with did not understand how it was possible that I did not have my lawyer’s phone number.

The judicial support is understood to be approved after a certain period, something that Marta Couto never explained and with that excuse she would have kept us waiting for who knows how many more months.

If we consider that everything is extra, going to trial with Jaime Roriz’s law firm might have cost me 8 thousand euros and 2 more years of waiting.

In addition, after going to consult with other lawyers, it is clear that with Marta Couto we would have lost the trial and we would have been more miserable than before.

With all the emails and the conversation I had, I reported this law firm to the Ordem de Advogados and not because of the extreme slowness of Marta Couto, nor because of the abusive prices, nor because of the enormous incompetence of the CFO Sara Filipa, but because of the criminal and intimidating behavior of Mr. Jaime Roriz, which is the opposite of what a lawyer should be.

Jaime Roriz immediately deleted the review I left on Google and if by deleting the negative reviews they have a 3.7 score, which is bad enough, imagine the real evaluation that would appear if they didn’t delete the bad reviews.

Here I leave a sample of the reviews. As you can see, this law firm has plenty of negative reviews. I wonder if Mr. Jaime Roriz has threatened and harassed all these people who, like me, recounted the terrible experiences they had.