Q: What steps can I take, your newly selected court appointed attorney does not return emails, or calls? A month
Month long problem
A:
What steps can you take? You can't choose your court-appointed attorney. If you want choice you need to hire a private attorney. If think you can't afford it then sell something or ask friends and family for help.
When you rely on a court appointed attorney you are basically playing Russian Roulette with your future. You might get a good one, you might not. The problem is that the government doesn't pay them nearly enough per case... because taxpayers don't want to spend any more money than absolutely necessary on defending poor people.
So anyway, the "good" court appointed lawyers essentially use a portion of the fees paid by their privately-retained clients to subsidize the legal work on their court appointed cases. This is, of course, unfair to the private clients who paid for more legal work than they are actually getting.
An attorney has a duty to represent each client to the best of her ability. Among the "bad" court appointed lawyers are those that represent their private clients much more zealously than their appointed clients. When the attorney's efforts are proportional to the amount paid, and the private client paid $6,000 and the court-appointed is only paying $300 (via the taxpayers) then you see where that is going ....
Finally, there are bad court-appointed attorneys who try to make it without any private clients. It is basically impossible to keep the lights on with $300 cases unless the attorney has a TON of them and burns through them VERY quickly. Some of these guys are pushing 250+ cases per year and there are only 260 working days in a year. With that many clients you will be lucky if your attorney spends even a single day working on your case and your calls and emails probably won't be returned in a timely fashion because your attorney literally has more important things to do. There are some very fine attorneys who fall into this trap and they end up working nights and weekends and eventually either burning out or drinking themselves to death.
If you want your choice of attorney and you don't want some of your money diverted to somebody else's court-appointed case, then you'll hire a private attorney that does not accept court-appointed cases.
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