Castelda & Castelda Inc

Helpful, cutthroat, confident, knowledgeable and personable. Very good qualities in a law firm!
Aug 28th, 2021

They are the best of the best in Okanogan County. I am honored to be represented by this firm!
May 13th, 2021

We must be talking about a different Tony. We have used his counsel twice and are happy both times. We’ll be back if his services are needed again, with no regrets.
Aug 25th, 2020

I am so thankful for how amazing and kind they have been!! I have never dealt with a lawyer as professional, helpful and honest as Tony!
Aug 5th, 2020

My experience with the legal office of Tony Castelda has been one of disappointment & disgust. He is indifferent, lacking in the skills required to be a proper counsel, & overpriced, & I'll lay out what happened to me below as a warning to others:1. Indifference: on three separate occasions he called me only to put me on hold because he couldn't remember what was happening with my case & hadn't bothered to look through my file before calling me to refresh his memory.2. Castelda also didn't use any of the advantages I had in my case when possible because he couldn't be bothered, including the following:a. $50,000 difference in property evaluation on a shared which was in my favor b. $35,000 in maintenance fees paid by me on a shared property over a single year. I spent dozens of hours over several months on compiling those numbers at his own suggestion, & he threw all that work out the window. c. $2,400 the opposing party owed me that came from rent on the shared property.3. Wasteful: he wasted roughly $2,000 of my money on items that I was not informed of beforehand would cost that much, or were not necessary, or both.a. Interrogatories: Castelda recommended I do a demand for answers from the opposing party. What he failed to tell me until after I'd spent the money was that no judge would hold them to account for their answers (and they did lie), rendering all the money spent on that endeavor as completely wasted. I also drove to Tonasket to speak with him about the answers (after confirming he was available) only to be turned away with a 'nope, not available anymore.' We never did discuss the interrogatories, & I later discovered that he hadn't even read them. Cost: $800+ b. Final Decree documents: Castelda was 'kind' enough to offer that I pay for the creation of the final documents, rather than the opposing side that was getting all the money. What he failed to tell me was that I would also be paying for any & all demands they made for changes, which ended up costing me several hundred dollars. I also had no approval in the changes demanded by the other side. He made the changes & billed me. Cost: $500+ c. Property evaulation wherein a shared property the opposing side demanded was worth more in my evaluation than the one performed by them. Never used. Cost: $300+ d. Castelda filed for a jury trial, but only after filing did he admitted that the trial would be far more expensive than what I could afford, & that the judge could even force me to sell my house. If he had been upfront about these details I would never have agreed to filing for a trial. Also before the filing, he told me the money I had earned since separation was all mine, & that the opposing party wouldn't 'necessarily' have any right to the money in my business account. Castelda ended up handing over ALL of my business account money to the opposing party. The worst part about the jury trial filing was he stuck me between the threats of the opposing side & the fear of losing my house. Under that pressure I offered more money than I could afford so I could close the divorce. Cost: $400+4. I never felt like I was his client, only a money purse. Castelda would often refer to me in letters to the opposing party not in the traditional manner of 'my client,' but by using my surname. Also, he will believe opposing party accusations over his own clients, which happened to me when the other party accused me of embezzlement. In speaking with Castelda about the matter, never did I get the impression that he believed me, even after I provided proof that showed their claim was a lie.5. Castelda would put comments in letters & documents which we did not discuss, & many of which I outright rejected when I discovered them. Case in point, in the final documents I requested that we schedule the money to be paid out over four months. What he ended up putting was that I would pay out within a year WITH 12% INTEREST. There was no discussion of this interest at all, & if I had known he intended to put that in there I would have dropped the installment idea, which ended up being what happened anyway because of the opposing side, so he wasted a draft copy because he was too incompetent to share with me all of what he planned for MY documents.6. Castelda brags about his 30 years of experience, but there's little evidence he knows how to do anything more than waste money & file documents. As mentioned above, he doesn't give counsel. Quite the contrary. When a problem arose & I called him to discuss the matter, he would ask me what I wanted to do. There would be no offer of suggestions (you know, COUNSEL) from him. It would be 'what do you want to do,' & when I asked him my options he would hem & haw without actually laying out what I could do.7. Embarrasing representation when it came to corresponding with me & the opposing party. Four-fifths of the letters/documents had glaring typos, & one letter sent to the opposing attorney even had a repeat sentence. The errors on the Interrogatories were so glaring that the opposing party marked them out.8. There are two staff members, & one doesn't know what the other is doing. Asking questions about what was in my file or if Castelda had researched anything was a waste of time. What's worse is that I emailed them a question & didn't receive a reply until two weeks later when the staff told me they'd been deleting emails & discovered my unanswered one. They never did reply back to my last email.9. The cherry on top came (appropriately) at the end when I learned that, though he had sent the opposing party the final documents TWICE, he hadn't bothered to include any of my real estate documents. His reasoning was that they wouldn't sign until after the final documents were filed, but when I pointed out that those documents would have been in their possession to sign the day after the filing, he had no reply. Worse still, I had been in his office twice to sign other documents for the opposing party & myself, & he hadn't bothered to prepare those documents for ME to sign during either of those visits. Then there was the added insult that the documents would 'only cost $250' (Castelda's exact words). To add to this, this delay prevented me from placing my property in a lower-cost land designation. He closed up shop for the holidays & went home without having even the common courtesy of informing me of the closure ahead of time (I found out by calling the office & getting their voice message). The cost of that delay is $1500+ more I can't afford.In sum, I lost every penny I owned (and then some), lost $2,000 of wasteful spending to the attorney, lost another $1500+ to future property taxes, & went through 13 months of an emotional rollercoaster, much of it due to Castelda's poor decisions, leaving me with nothing in the bank, $4,000 in debt to a relative, & a year of my life wasted dealing with Castelda's indifference.I hope in writing this review others will avoid the same mistake I made. Don't hire Castelda as your attorney. He won't care about you, & that indifference will cost you emotionally & financially. Try Chase at Chase & Miller, in Okanogan, but don't try Reinbold. She's just as bad.
Dec 29th, 2021