Power Lawyer Marta

About one month ago, my friend Chris (in photo, Margarita took this) and I met with a lawyer named Marta, who Shannon, another friend, quickly dubbed Power Lawyer. After a brief 20 min meeting with her, both Chris and I knew that we had to hire her. She knows the system forwards and backwards and has a good relationship with all the levels of the adoption process. After going to the court and asking to see Margarita’s file, all public information here, she discovered that my previous lawyer had not done anything for almost over a month. The file was just sitting there. Therefore the additional costs in hiring a new lawyer at this stage is well worth it since she knows what the heck she is doing.

We are waiting for the Child Welfare Institution to send the Family Court their communication that I have passed all the requisites and their testing. Once the family court receives this report they then will proceed with the legalization of the adoption sentence, which takes 3 weeks. My lawyer then takes the sentence and it is notarized into a public deed which I and the director of the child welfare institution will sign. Then Power Lawyer takes these various papers to the registry office to the island of Roatan, where Margarita was born, to obtain a new birth certificate with me as the mother. I then take that to immigration to get Margarita a Honduran passport.

Simultaneously, U.S. Immigration is doing their Orphan Child Investigation. I had to pay a fee, have my fingerprints taken and provide a whole slew of additional paperwork on the legal status of Margarita, death certificates of her biological mother and the woman that registered her as her child, and when they asked for more proof, I just called Power Lawyer, and she got the documents from Roatan for me. Really, she is well worth the money she is charging if she completes this in less than 3 months, like she has promised.

I will be in Phoenix April 3-10^th, so hope to see you then.

Hugs,