Dorsey Law

A lot of thanks to Mr. Dorsey, we were able to get out our rental house lease contract with the landlord, and have our deposit/pre-paid rent back.
We were happy with the rental house, until there was a slab leak back in June. I noticed that the engineered wood floor was popping up, and heard the watery sound when stepping on it. Told the landlord about the problem, and it took him 3 weeks to finally accept it's a slab leak and fix it. Therefore on July 4th afternoon, the landlord decided to shut off the main water, and asked us to stay in the house using water tank to temporarily hold water for use. We refused mainly for our 1.5 years old daughter, and moved into a nearby hotel room. We stayed there for a week until we determined that this was not going to work, and learned that the landlord was expecting our renter's insurance to pay for the hotel stay, not from his home insurance or his pocket. Given this financial constraint, as we as the fact that the repair work will take at least another 3 weeks, for which we will have to move our furnitures as well, we asked to terminate the lease contract. We told the landlord that in addition to the timing problem, we have serious health concerns to have our toddler live back to a dirty water soaked place, and my wife was going through a pre-scheduled medical procedure, making it even more difficult not to have a stable place to stay. The landlord had his brother (who happened to be his property manager and they both live in Austin) to tell us that we should keep our medical conditions only to ourselves, and it's irrelevant to the lease term. At this time I already pre-paid the July rent, so the landlord told us unless we agree to forfeit our deposit and July rent, he is not letting us to move out. After a lot of phone calls, we were out of options, and decided to request legal assistance.
Fortunately for us, my wife enrolled legal assistance program through her employer, and was given a list of local lawyers who are in the legal network. I tried to make phone calls, which lead me to Mr. Dorsey, who not only spent his precious time listening to our situation, but also immediately started looking into the related law to help us. The same day he drafted a letter and sent it over to the landlord and his brother. Next day the landlord agreed to us moving out and returning the deposit/pre-paid rent, as long as I complete the move-out cleaning. After I provided the evidence that I cleaned everything as required the same weekend, the landlord returned our deposit and half of July rent, since we were only able to move our furnitures out by July 16th.
It was very unfortunate situation that we had such unpleasant experience with this kind of landlord, but we were so fortunate to have Mr. Dorsey on our side helping us deal with such unfair and illegal activities. To me it was the fact that after being pushed around and tried to accommodate in every possible way, only Mr. Dorsey was willing to listen to us and be our voice to fight on our behalf, this truly matters and means so much to us. I never thought the landlord would be willing to compromise until Mr. Dorsey's letter did the magic. Our most sincere appreciation, Mr. Dorsey! Also lessons learned, always good to have a legal support when dealing with unfair and illegal activities.