Greco John J

Was unprofessional & billed 1,000s of dollars in excess & in breach of his retainer agreement. He verbally assaulted me on several occasions including when I discovered errors (the "go to" response rather than admit to the errors) that he made that exposed me to significant financial risk & threatened to leave me in a lurch at the last minute, breached his retainer agreement w. me which required him to notify me in advance if he even intended to exceed the retainer I gave him (which he agreed to in a followup email), told me that money remained from the retainer when I questioned him several times (I managed my expenses closely), withheld money from my sale proceeds (several thousands) illegally as leverage against his invoice that was not only unexpected, but not even presented to me in advance. He told me he forgot to send me my money & then sent it to me after I discovered it missing & immediately started trying to collect on the invoice & threatened to sue me. He also later told the judge that he did not have time to notify me in advance of exceeding the retainer due to the pace of the case (which was slow), yet his one & only bill indicated he exceeded the retainer 3 months before submitting his bill!I filed a grievance with the NYS Grievance Committee & it was turned over to arbitration. In the arbitration hearing his assistant admitted that she told him not to send me the money until his unexpected invoice was paid, thereby refuting their above statement that it was an oversight. As I alleged in my complaint, Greco decided he wanted to extract more money from me when he handled my sale proceeds. He admitted to same in the arbitration hearing by stating that I could afford to pay him based on the amount I received from my property sale (despite a financial hardship that Greco knew about). Even though I took action to prevent overbilling, Greco simply ignored the rider I added to his retainer agreement which he agreed to & later stated to the Judge that it was merely a suggestion, not a requirement. His legal arguments failed to even convince the judge to grant me a day in court for him to argue my case. Please note there is an Attorney Grievance Committee for a reason as overbilling is common & some attorneys know that they will likely get away with doing so merely because they are attorneys, and end up targeting their clients who provided business & income to them.