Kriss Law/Atlantic Closing & Escrow

I can’t thank Seth Levine and his team enough at Atlantic Closing & Escrow! I had an a short window to close and they made everything run seamlessly. They were quick, efficient, and pleasant to work with. I absolutely will recommend them to anyone who is looking!

TERRIBLE!!! BEWARE!!! Kriss Law doesn’t do their homework! His company guesstimated the taxes on our new home and were $ 3,000 off! After a year of living in the house, the bank wanted to be reimbursed for having paid our taxes over the year. I spoke with Scott directly and he admitted that his company failed to catch the error during the closing process. It requires a 30 second phone call to the town hall to find out the taxes on a property. It’s a matter of public record. Our taxes haven’t been that low since 2005! He offered to give me $ 200 as compensation for their huge error, which he never even sent!!! He’s takes no responsibility for his mistakes! Because of his error our mortgage has increased by $ 200/​month and this is after we wrote a check to the bank for $ 3,000. Thankfully we can still afford the house, but I worry for people who he does this too who can’t afford the steeper mortgage. Seems like a great way to close deals… if you make up numbers everyone can afford something. AND, we paid him $ 1200 to close the property. He didn’t even have the decency to reimburse us for the work he failed to do!!! If I knew we’d get hosed, I would have done the work myself.

Scott Taylor was great to work with on the closing of my wife and my first home. Great communication, nice guy!

Scott Kriss does a great job for my clients. He has some very good people working for him that make the real estate closing process as smooth and stress free as possible. Highly recommend them.

Thank you much, Dan Pinch!
Scott Kriss was my closing attorney over 2 years ago, and I recall the experience being fairly pleasant and straightforward, though that is not what I am reviewing today…
I needed to gather my condo docs for a loan application and found that I was missing one important document. I had everything else I needed but this one doc decided to be particularly elusive — aka outright missing. Not wanting to pay my current management company’s exorbitant fee of $ 50 for one document (you can bet I will be reviewing them soon, too) and I seeing as how I was never given a copy for some reason, which should have been in my possession with all my closing paperwork, I decided to look up my old attorney and ask for help.
I spoke with Dan Pinch in the Scott Kriss offices, pled my case, so to speak, and he said he would follow up. I am not patient. On my follow up phone call to Dan, it was then that explained I really needed the document today — and Dan came through with flying colours! He was patient and went through several formatting configurations at near-​end-​of-​day on a Friday to find the right one and he was kind enough to scan and email a pdf so that I could access it right away. He was a true prince — he stuck with me to make sure all my paperwork was good, and as we were waiting for the document to load, we even chatted some about his impending fatherhood (congrats, by the way!)
My situation was handled with professionalism, kindness, reassurance and, upon following up, diligence.
4 stars b/​c I had to place the follow-​up call instead of the other way around. But, to be fair, I am impatient!

My wife and I were first-​time home buyers and used the Law Offices of Scott D. Kriss when buying our house. The transaction was a short sale, and began with the offer and purchase & sale agreement, followed by approximately 6 months of waiting for approval, followed by 3 – 4 weeks of additional negotiation, and finally the closing. Overall our experience using this law firm was poor. I will highlight a couple of our experiences:
1) The purchase and sale agreement was obviously drafted too quickly and without any sort of proofreading. There were many spelling mistakes, our current address was incorrect, and the total purchase price was wrong by a factor of 1,000 ($ 233 million instead of $ 233,000 — ouch!). We brought it to the attention of Attorney Kriss and he first suggested that we cross out all of the mistakes and write in the corrections, but on the advice of our real estate agent we asked him to re-​write the agreement. After everything was worked out, he apologized and offered to waive his fee for the preparation of this document. We were pleased with this resolution and took him at his word that there would be no further complications.
2) Fast forward 6 months. After we (me, my wife, and Attorney Kriss) negotiated the offer a bit with the seller’s bank & attorney, we settled on a new purchase price that everyone was pleased with, and the seller’s bank gave final approval on the deal. The closing documents were prepared. Our mortgage broker got the HUD settlement statement to the attorneys’ office with 3 full business days to go before the closing. The attorney was supposed to add all of the additional fees and produce a final HUD statement. We were anxious to review this document given the history with the purchase & sale agreement — we wanted to make sure everything on this form was correct.
We finally received the HUD statement from the attorney the around 6:00PM the night before the closing was scheduled to happen. The purchase price was again incorrect; it showed the original price we offered, not the revised price agreed upon with the bank, and the property tax figures were calculated incorrectly. I attempted without success to get a hold of Scott Kriss that evening and instead spent a while on the phone with our mortgage broker who graciously offered to help me decipher what was wrong with the statement.
We discovered that our mortgage broker was not aware of the «new» purchase price (which had actually been finalized weeks before), because the broker would have needed us to sign a revised contract reflecting this new price, and we had not — everything was agreed upon via email. Not recognizing or informing us of the need to sign a new contract was a serious oversight on our attorney’s part (especially for one who claims to specialize in short sales), and once we realized the issue we had to sign a new contract with the sellers and scramble to get our bank to re-​approve our loan at the new price. This issue would have been much easier to identify and resolve if we had received the HUD earlier (even earlier that day, and that would have still given the law firm 2 business days to prepare it).
The closing had been scheduled for the following day. We didn’t receive the revised and corrected HUD statement for review until after 3PM, which was less than two hours before the closing. We discovered during the closing that there was an item omitted from this corrected HUD: payment to the seller for heating oil still in the tank. We were surprised with this charge at the closing and had to mail a personal check the following day to cover it.
I will say that there was a pleasant surprise: at the closing the attorney gave us half of his fee as a credit. It was a small gesture but it did do a lot to smooth things over at the time.
Additionally, we found the following things to be true throughout the transaction:
* It was difficult to keep in touch with any single person about our transaction. This is somewhat understandable given the length of our transaction (~7 months start to finish), but it seemed that even in the final days before the closing, we were told each day that someone different would be handling things. The attorney present at our closing was someone I had never met or interacted with before that day and he understandably had no knowledge of the prior difficulties we had encountered with our transaction.
* Scott Kriss would not return phone calls. When he was in his office (which was rarely) I could typically reach him at his desk phone, but I asked him a dozen or more times via email to call me and I never once got a call back. On one occasion he did reply to one of my emails and told me he’d call me the following morning, but he never did; I had to call him.
I would not recommend the Law Offices of Scott D. Kriss. If you use their services, anticipate having to review everything they produce and staying on top of them to get things done in a timely manner.