Brandon Bakhtiar

Jill is the Bruce Lee in this area. She is also fair, hard working and responsive. I recommend her. I can’t say enough how glad I was she was able to sincerely help. Jill has experience and is respected in her field and this definitely helps in negotiations. I had had multiple negative experiences with mediators and Parental Coordinators prior to being lucky enough to speak with Jill. One experience with a mediator I wish to warn you all of was so close to threatening that I almost filed a small claim against him. Avoid Robert B. as a mediator. Outright yelled and threaten to give whoever ceased “continuing the process” as “not being cooperative”. Our MSA allocated $3000 for him to arrive at a custody schedule. He literally spent much of the first meetings drawing family trees and insisting what we felt about the other when the MSA was done and all we needed was a parenting plan as the court ordered. Once he figured out we were court ordered he insisted on speaking with our family which I went along out of fear and hoping the “process” would just end but he’d have multiple calls with them and bill us, he would insist on drawing out family trees and when all I wanted was to stop being billed and to arrive at a conclusion he would yell and spend 20 minutes of the session talking about anything other than making progress. He dragged out the process for over 3 months until our total billing added up to more than 4X what we had told him at the beginning was our budget. Very manipulative and threatening. Watch out for his technique of saying he’s giving you a “discount” and where he uses two columns of “hours worked” DO NOT ALLOW THIS. Tell him to put ONE record of hours worked and you don’t want a second column to “show the discount”. Why? Because when you want to stop he threatened to bill for the “unbilled”...and this was when we were already over double the budget our MSA has stipulated. It was terrible to be trapped by this guy while enduring a custody battle. He is cheaper per hour at just over $200/hour but do not allow him to record multiple hours on the invoices because he will use those as leverage. Thank god I had a friend in another law field say wonderful things about Jill. I am lucky she was very opposite of the terrible mediator.