<p>My experience, too Zoos. I purchased a property facilitated by atty representing seller and me, signed paper that I accepted that.</p>
<p>To alh(re post 137) the Op already has hired an atty to represent her interests. But she has told us here that she doesn’t want to pay for her atty’s advice on whether to pay any part of this bill. Instead, she’ll pay as a good will gesture, the exact amount for the oop costs that she was billed, but not agree to owing any money.</p>
<p>Emerald, my H paid an atty to look over the agreement. He paid for her time. If we use more of her time, we have to pay more money. What is she going to do? Tell us that we don’t have to pay this guy’s bill? We know that already. Write a letter to him saying that we don’t have to pay his bill? We can do that. In the HIGHLY unlikely event that he chooses to ignore the fact that we have no obligation to pay for his time, THEN we can pay a lawyer to write a letter to him. (Or I can just let him know that if he doesn’t cease and desist immediately I will go straight to the bar association and file a complaint against him. But he’s not going to do that, because a) he knows as well as we do that we have no obligation to pay him anything, and b) he knows that doing so would damage his reputation.)</p>
<p>alh, I don’t understand why you would send money to the neighbor to reimburse him for fees that HE didn’t pay. Why not simply reimburse whoever DID pay the fees? I have as visceral a reaction as you do to not paying fees to some lawyer because some other lawyer is trying to hold me up. The sharks have it very well arranged between them. We’d end up as a nice meal for the two of them and they’d end up with the money. One thing that a lawyer has that we don’t is a free lawyer. If we choose to engage in legal action with him, he can cheerfully run up our bill with our lawyer. No thanks. (BTW, I do not mean to imply that all lawyers are sharks. Just some of them. 
More to the point, the innately adversarial nature of the legal profession leads people to engage in battles that they do not need to fight.)</p>
<p>consolation: I would send the money to the neighbor 1) because if this was my neighbor I would want to be upfront and talking about it. Someone wise once told me disagreements are usually just the result of a miscommunication 2) the neighbor is ultimately responsible for these bills and can forward the payment to his attorney. 3) it seems you feel the neighbor’s lawyer is sort of trying to blackmail you with a threat to your husband’s reputation in the community and imho best to nip that right in the bud</p>
<p>ymmv</p>
<p>How you handle this may impact how people view you in the new community. I don’t feel how you propose to handle it will create the impression you wish.</p>
<p>edit: fwiw I am in a new community and one thing my local lawyer does is give me advice as to how to do things in this particular community. That is beyond legal advice but extremely helpful to me. The fact this lawyer is “my” lawyer makes people in the community more comfortable with me. I have not paid this lawyer $2000 and that included creating new wills for H and me. We were looking for something to pay him for so we had someone to go to for advice when local issues came up.</p>
<p>I think I can explain to you Consolation, why Alh and others have said “pay the neighbor”. I have tried to explain it before, but maybe I wasn’t clear.
Any time or money their atty spent to complete the job your neighbors contracted should rightfully be billed to the guy that hired him to do the job- your neighbors. Simple as this: any costs the atty had while performing the service for the neighbor should be billed to the neighbor. It would be the neighbors debt to reimburse the atty. Therefore, the proper good will gesture, based on that, would be to send a good will payment to the guy that owes the money, to help him pay his bills. It goes back to my example pages ago, about paying my roofer. If my roofer has costs because he is repairing my roof, as I hired him to do, why should my neighbor have to pay my bills?
Engage in legal action? Really? Who said that? People have suggested Op seek advice, not file suit in Supreme Court.</p>
<p>alh, this is not a new community. We have lived here for 16 years. I have no concern about “making an impression” on anyone. My H was concerned that the atty might subtly let it be known that H was not a good/trustworthy guy in legal/financial circles, but I think that is unlikely. (Reputation and recommendations, both positive and negative, are extremely important to investment advisors. That is how they get clients.) I think it is even more unlikely if we reimburse him for costs that we might have made him eat.</p>
<p>As an aside, I have a number of long-term friends and acquaintances who are attys with the most prominent law firms in the area. I could probably do far more damage to this atty by telling them that he tried to get us to pay his fees than he could possibly do to me.</p>
<p>I understand your point, younghoss, but assuming that our neighbor is trying to not pay the atty money that is owed, which does seem to be the case, I do not wish to put $$ in the neighbor’s pocket. Nor do I wish to engage in conversation with the neighbor about whether he has paid, or intends to pay, his legal bills, or about whether he thinks WE ought to pay them because in his mind we owe him something. Some words cannot be unsaid. I prefer not to go there.</p>
<p>sorry consolation for not understanding you are a long-time resident.</p>
<p>I would still talk to the neighbor, no matter how difficult,
and not pay the neighbor’s attorney</p>
<p>or if completely impossible to talk to the neighbor, not pay the attorney</p>
<p>I would never pay the neighbor’s attorney.</p>
<p>edit: I would pay the neighbor’s attorney if a trusted local lawyer who understood the community advised me to do so.</p>
<p>I am so sorry you are having to deal with this.</p>
<p>I suppose one more option not yet discussed, is that OP could send check and letter as previously described payable the neighbor’s atty, but send to the neighbor, with a note that it is a good will gesture to help him with costs he has incurred.
Not a great option imo, but neighbor would get the good will, but the neighbors atty would get the money.</p>
<p>If this is true: “assuming that our neighbor is trying to not pay the atty money that is owed…” then what you mean is: assuming that our neighbor is trying to not pay the atty money that [our neighbor owes…] The key there being whether your neighbor pays it or not, it is money your neighbor owes.
Question for Consolation- if your neighbor stiffs the electric company, would you pay that bill, or if he misses a car payment? If not, why would you choose to pay if he stiffs his atty, particularly since you have explained you are not concerned about the possible harm to your reputation if word got around that you didn’t pay your neighbor’s bills?</p>
<p>‘I don’t understand why you would send money to the neighbor to reimburse him for fees that HE didn’t pay. Why not simply reimburse whoever DID pay the fees?’</p>
<p>Consolation,
I think what folks are trying to say is: the out of pocket expenses incurred by your neighbor’s lawyers are ultimately your neighbors obligations and the lawyer should (and maybe did) bill them for them. If you feel that those expenses are something you want to assume based upon your benefit, then you can pay your neighbor for those fees that the lawyer charged (or should have charged) to them.</p>
<p>one thing I would definitely be concerned about, when neighbors aren’t communicating, is the potential for insult on the part of one neighbor because of having their bills paid by another neighbor without any solicitation on the first neighbor’s part. It could be seen as quite presumptuous.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Oh, come on. The fees in question were paid to register OUR deed, and to OUR bank to alter OUR loan. </p>
<p>There is an obvious difference between this and the neighbor’s electric bill.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>We could do that. I don’t really see the point, though, unless one assumes that reimbursing the atty for the out-of-pocket fees somehow implies that we are accepting responsibility for his hours. I do not think that is the case, particularly if we get him to withdraw his earlier bill and acknowledge in writing that we have no obligation. I do see a possibility that our neighbor would pocket the money and still not pay the lawyer, because I have the feeling that the neighbor has been working up a good case of self-justification, a la Mansfield Park.</p>
<p>alh, since our neighbor will be cced on anything written about this, he will know that the atty asked us for the fees. Trust me, I doubt that the atty would have approached us with this bill if my neighbor was proudly discharging his obligations. 
One would have to be nuts to find it presumptuous.</p>
<p>consolation: Do you have direct evidence (lol tv talk) that your neighbor even knows about this billing? Is there something in writing from that neighbor to you? Or is it just a bill from the neighbor’s lawyer and that lawyer telling you something that leads you to believe your neighbor now wants you to pay part of this whole deal after originally agreeing that all costs would be his/hers?</p>
<p>All this behind the back speculation (if that is what it is- apologies if it is not) makes me very uncomfortable.</p>
<p>I would just walk next door and ask them over for drinks. :)</p>
<p>and frankly I would have no problem telling them, “As we told you before, we are unwilling to take on any expense for the project you were proposing, but were happy to enable you to proceed with our non-monetary cooperation. Can I get you a refill?”</p>
<p>Last try:
The amendment to YOUR deed and YOUR loan at YOUR bank was done by your neighbor’s attorney for the benefit of your neighbor. It is not something you contracted to have the attorney do for you.
The neighbor owes his attorney for carrying out the particulars of his contract. Your benefit was a side effect of this contract.
Your obligation to the attorney is non-existent regardless of you neighbor’s ability or willingness to ‘discharge his obligations’.
I scratch my head at your willingness to assume his debt.</p>
<p>But all costs(re post 150) are for your neighbor’s benefit. That is why I make the example.</p>
<p>Good luck, mom(post 152)</p>
<p>To Op:
In your note to neighbors(re: post 147), it would be easy to mention that you have mentioned to their atty about this action. It is plenty easy to send a note to neighbors atty that you have sent a check payable to him for Xdollars in care of your neighbors as a goodwill gesture for your neighbors to help with the costs they incurred. This way, all parties know about the check.</p>
<p>To alh: it was suggested as early as post 9 to take bill over to the neighbors. That would be a good way to indicate in a nice way that it isn’t Op’s bill, the bill had come to Op by mistake, so neighbor and neighbor atty could “save face” by correcting this. So far, Op has not indicated that is acceptable.</p>
<p>But Consolation, you want to say paying his electric bills are so different than paying his atty bills, because his atty re-did your loan. Really? Someone said this about that in post 13:
“LasMa, you have a point, but we did not engage this lawyer to handle our banking affairs! We would have done it ourselves.” It was YOU that said that. With that in mind, his atty fees are no more your bill than his electric bill is.</p>
<p>Look, younghoss, and mominva, I know FULL WELL that the costs were incurred by my neighbor’s atty for my neighbor’s benefit. I know full well that we have no legal obligation to pay them.</p>
<p>I also know full well that I <em>did</em> derive some benefit from this deal. I gained a half acre of land directly behind my house in exchange for a ROW over 75 feet of swampy, unusable land 300 feet from my house fully buffered by woods where I believe I have not set foot in 16 years of living here. So if I choose to be generous and make the gesture of paying the comparatively modest out of pocket fees, I am not doing so because I am an idiot or because I am suffering from some delusion that I am under legal obligation to do so.</p>
<p>Younghoss, if we had dealt with the bank ourselves, we would STILL have had to pay these fees.</p>
<p>And no, I am not going to create open unpleasantness by confronting my neighbor about this bill. And taking it over to their house and saying that “there must be some mistake” will simply humiliate or anger them.</p>
<p>younghoss: I have read the whole thread and understand the OP has already received excellent advice. Sometimes I just like to give my opinion even if I’m just repeating someone else. Probably this is even more annoying in real life than on a message board :)</p>
<p>alh, you aren’t annoying in the least. I, on the other hand, am apparently annoying younghoss because I persist in ignoring his advice that would have the result, IMHO, of humiliating and/or angering my neighbors. Maybe younghoss would greet a neighbor at the door with this legal bill with complete equanimity. I doubt many others would.</p>
<p>If we can deal with this matter quietly without confronting our neighbor and hearing about how either A) he is trying to stiff his lawyer, or B) he thinks that we owe him big time and ought to pay the full bill, that is infinitely preferable to me.</p>
<p>no, no, I hope you didn’t think I meant you were annoying, and I hope I wasn’t either. I pointed it out for much the same reasons you did- I also felt is was excellent advice given a long time ago.</p>
<p>consolation: I understand you think they have decided you really owe them something. I have missed where you got that idea. I don’t think having a face to face meeting has to be humiliating for them. At the very least, I would invite them over just so we were still talking – even if none of this business stuff was even mentioned. It just seems to me a whole lot of assumptions are being made about the neighbors. Maybe I am wrong???</p>
<p>I also think it is very easy to tell people you won’t pay for what you didn’t contract for in a very nice way and make it almost impossible for them to feel in any way embarrassed. You may have to role play if you aren’t used to doing this. I, unfortunately, have had quite a bit of practice lately. :)</p>
<p>consolation, I don’t think you should confront your neighbor, but maybe you should inform him/her? Your good intentions could be taken the wrong way if there is information you don’t have. In his situation, I would want to know, and I think the neighbor has the right to know. It doesn’t have to be a confrontation at all.</p>