Mathews Professional Corporation

Upon deciding to move in together, my boyfriend and I decided it would be a wise decision to get a cohabitation agreement to protect ourselves and our assets until we get married. I don’t have a family lawyer and so I was left wondering where to begin my search. My parents had been looking for a lawyer to redo their will and suggested Mathews Professional Corporation, even though they had yet to use them. They had a positive experience dealing with reception and having their questions answered so we went ahead and scheduled a meeting.
Matthews Professional Corporation is located on Clements road, in a nondescript realty building. If I hadn’t looked up/​been given specific directions, I would have driven right by them.
We arrived for our first appointment and met with Mr. Matthews (his first name escapes me), who clearly is the primary (and only I think…) lawyer in the firm. He was quite nice and we sat down to discuss what we needed and wanted from the agreement. He asked a lot of good questions, things we hadn’t thought of even though we had done our research. After our meeting, we were told to expect a draft via email for us to review. They also noted that the length of the process would be largely dependent on how fast we got back to them with information. I’ll note now that we were NOT fast in getting back to them, unfortunately we had a number of delays before we could provide them with information and get the final signing done as well.
Upon receipt of the agreement, I noted a number of issues right off the bat. First of all it was very clear that this agreement hadn’t been created specifically for us, and I don’t think it was even a standard boilerplate agreement that had just had our names inserted. It was clear that another cohabitation agreement had been taken and information modified to match ours. First of all, another address, in another town, was listed as a header in one section. Second of all, there were a number of spelling and grammatical errors throughout the document. We wrote back with a number of changes and they were made right away.
For someone who hasn’t dealt with a lawyers office before, I think I had higher expectations for the work in progress document that we received. I get that this isn’t a big ticket item (cost was about $ 565 for the agreement and our two meetings) but I’ve paid for the service of having an agreement drawn up and it has simple mistakes throughout it that should have been caught on final review before sending it to us. That was a big turnoff right off the bat — if I sent out something like that from my job, my boss would flip and in general, it would look bad on the company.
Overall, this was an okay experience but I think I expected a higher level of professionalism (don’t send me documents with someone else’s information on them and spelling mistakes). Their website is a bit misleading (which could be me reading into the visual picture they’re painting) in that it was more than just one person in an office. if you’re looking for a lawyer, call a few offices and ask friends. I wish I’d done more of that for my experience.