Mr. Shaw is incredible! I'm the Sales Specialist for a firm in a different state, I always refer people to his office when they need an estate/probate attorney in Iowa. I can definitely say that he is client focused!

Bought and sold a house with Mr. Shaw and were very pleased with the services.

After receiving a recommendation from a lawyer that handled a family member's estate, we approached Melvin to have two wills, two power of attorneys, and two living will/medical power of attorneys. Our first sign that there may be a problem was Melvin's apparent lack of knowledge regarding Iowa inheritance tax law when he stated no tax is paid when inheriting from a sibling. This is something we knew to not be true as we had just settled an estate from a sibling where a tax, while at a lower rate than if it had been a non family member, had to be paid. The next mistake was ours. We paid the full amount for these six documents up front and the price was pretty high considering the amount of effort involved. We set those concerns aside and mistakenly assumed that we would be getting the best quality work and service. We were told that our documents would be finished in seven to ten days. Ten days passed with no communication. When we were able to finally contact Melvin, after his being unavailable for several days, he explained that he thought he had sent the draft documents via email a few days after our initial meeting, but for some reason had not. We then went through a great deal of scheduling and coordination difficulties getting the documents signed. My three documents were signed within a few days. This was due to Melvin's willingness to relax his rule of ending his availability at 2:30 pm each day. I assume he did this more out of compensating for the email mistake and not out of any sense of flexibility. To be honest, at this point, I did not really need to meet that afternoon. We had already lost nearly two weeks due to his mistake. My fiancee's documents took around another week or two mainly because Melvin has, while often claiming otherwise, very little flexibility to meet with people that have to keep normal 9 to 5 work hours. The email mistake and scheduling difficulties caused us to wait much longer for our documents than we should have. The documents themselves had several factual errors most of which were resolved after often repeated attempts to do so. I was also particularity amazed at the difficulty Melvin and his office staff had with basic clerical duties. Many times we received documents, printed or emailed, that contained errors, unfixed errors, and basic formatting problems. Even to this day, weeks later, my fiancee's printed will still has an incorrect birthday. Melvin's solution to this was to finally make the fix, after repeated requests before and after signing, to an emailed pdf copy and nothing more. One of my documents has an omission regarding organ donation because it was overlooked at signing. And during much of our seemingly endless back and forth communication with Melvin and office staff, I often detected a very unapologetic, dismissive, and at times condescending attitude towards us as clients. We plan to discuss this with the lawyer that recommended Melvin and urge her not to make the mistake of recommending him to anyone else. We hope that this review might also serve as a warning to others to be careful about their choice in choosing a general practice lawyer. It is one thing to say you are about flexibility and good service. It is quite another to actually do it. Unfortunately, we were left very disappointed by our experience.

A great professional and a genuine, empathetic person all around. Convenient and relaxing office location and amenities.