Do You Need a Lawyer to Get Out of a Timeshare?

Do you need a lawyer to get out of a timeshare?

In my opinion, yes, and here’s why.

I have spent more than two decades working with timeshare owners and studying what happens when consumers try to end unwanted timeshare ownership.

Newton Group has helped more than 30,000 families. I authored The Consumer’s Guide to Timeshare Exit, which has been downloaded more than 50,000 times, and my work, interviews and commentary on timeshare exit and consumer protection have been featured or cited by USA Today, Bloomberg Television, CNBC, Fox Business, Forbes, U.S. News & World Report, Newsweek, The Miami Herald, PHOENIX Magazine, TravelMag, ValiantCEO Magazine, the Better Business Bureau’s Beacon Magazine, The Dave Ramsey Show and The National Law Review, among others.

I have also conducted the Newton Group Timeshare Exit Study, the largest ongoing study of timeshare exit experiences, which now includes more than 10,000 owner-reported experiences.

I also helped found what has become the nation’s leading timeshare consumer-rights law firm, where I serve as the founding non-attorney partner, CEO and majority owner.

I am not an attorney and I do not provide legal advice. But after more than two decades in this industry, more than 30,000 families helped and more than 10,000 owner-reported exit experiences studied, I have reached a clear conclusion:

If you are trying to get out of a timeshare, I believe you should have an attorney who personally represents you from the beginning.

• Not an attorney who represents the resort.
• Not an attorney who represents the exit company.
• Not simply access to an attorney.
• And not an attorney who may become involved later.

Your attorney. Representing you, the timeshare owner. From the beginning.

Here is why.

You Are Trying to Get Out of a Legally Binding Agreement

This is the starting point for my answer.

A timeshare isn’t simply a vacation product you no longer want. At the center of the ownership is a legally binding agreement that can involve contractual obligations, financing, maintenance fees, deeds, real estate interests and other legal documents.

Trying to end that ownership can raise important questions. What does your agreement require? What rights and obligations do you have? Do representations made during the original sale matter? Do you have potential legal claims or defenses? What financial obligations remain? What would a surrender, settlement or release actually accomplish, and what rights might you be giving up?

Those are legal questions surrounding a legally binding obligation.

That is why I believe the better question is not simply:

“Am I legally required to hire an attorney?”

The more important question is:

“Am I better protected having an attorney who personally represents me while I am trying to end a legally binding timeshare obligation?”

In my opinion, yes.

And I don’t believe the value of that representation begins only after something goes wrong.

The agreement is legally binding from the beginning. The value of having an attorney represent you begins there too.

More Than 10,000 Owner Experiences Reinforce My Answer

My opinion is not based only on my own experience.

The Newton Group Timeshare Exit Study, the largest ongoing study of timeshare exit experiences, now includes more than 10,000 owner-reported experiences.

Those owners have told us how they tried to end their ownership, what approaches they used, what they were told, the obstacles they encountered and where many of those efforts failed.

• Some dealt directly with resorts.
• Some tried to sell or transfer their timeshares.
• Some hired timeshare exit companies.
• Some sought legal help.
• Many tried more than one approach.

When you study more than 10,000 personal owner experiences, patterns emerge.

• You see owners struggling to understand what they actually owe.
• You see consumers unsure what their agreements require.
• You see owners relying on what a timeshare salesperson or an exit-company salesperson told them.
• You see promises that do not always produce the result the owner expected.

And again and again, you come back to the same reality:

The owner is trying to get out of a legally binding obligation.

That is one of the strongest reasons I believe a timeshare owner should have personal legal representation.

The Resort Has Lawyers Protecting Its Interests. Who Is Protecting Yours?

Timeshare developers have lawyers.

Those lawyers protect the developer’s interests. They advise the company, review agreements, protect its legal position and represent their client: the resort.

They do not represent the timeshare owner.

That matters even if the resort offers a surrender, deed-back, take-back or another proposed resolution.

The fact that a resort offers an option does not change whose interests the resort is protecting.

A proposed surrender, deed, release or other agreement may affect the owner’s contractual rights, financial obligations, potential claims or other interests.

Even determining whether an owner has rights worth preserving can require legal judgment.

That is why I do not believe the answer is simply:

“Go back to the resort and see what they offer.”

The resort already has lawyers looking out for its interests.

Who is looking out for the timeshare owner’s interests?

In my opinion, the owner should have an attorney whose professional duties are owed directly to the owner.

That is another major reason my answer is yes.

An Exit Company May Have Lawyers, But That Doesn’t Mean They Represent You, the Timeshare Owner

The same principle applies to a timeshare exit company.

An exit company may promote:

• “Attorney-led”
• “Attorneys on staff”
• “Legal oversight”
• A “legal team”
• A “co-branded” relationship with a law firm

An attorney may even speak directly with customers.

But none of that necessarily answers the most important question:

Does that attorney personally represent me?

You can be an exit company’s customer without being the attorney’s client.

If an attorney represents the exit company, that attorney’s professional duties are owed to the company.

If an attorney personally represents you, that attorney has a professional duty to protect and prioritize your interests, not the exit company’s, not the sales representative’s and certainly not the resort’s.

That distinction is so important that I wrote about it in The National Law Review in an article titled “Attorney Involvement Is Not Attorney Representation: Why Timeshare Exit Regulation Must Move Upstream.”

The principle is simple:

Attorney involvement is not the same as attorney representation.

Access to a lawyer is not the same as having your own lawyer.

When you are trying to get out of a legally binding timeshare agreement, I believe you should have the latter.

If Personal Legal Representation Is So Important, Why Doesn’t Every Exit Company Provide It?

This is an obvious and fair question.

If personal legal representation provides such an important level of consumer protection, why doesn’t every timeshare exit company provide it to every client?

I cannot tell you the internal reason any particular company chose its business model.

But in my opinion, there are two obvious practical reasons.

First, it is expensive.

Providing an actual attorney-client relationship to every client is very different from having an attorney on staff or hiring attorneys to advise the company.

If every client has an attorney who personally represents them, attorneys must have the capacity to represent those individual clients and assume professional duties directly to them.

That requires attorneys, time, infrastructure and money.

For a traditional exit company, providing personal legal representation to every client could materially increase the cost of delivering its service.

Second, it is difficult to build legally and ethically at scale.

It is not as simple as hiring an attorney and allowing that attorney to talk with customers.

An attorney can advise an exit company, work for the company, handle compliance and even communicate with customers.

None of that automatically means each customer is the attorney’s client.

Providing personal legal representation to every client requires a model capable of supporting real attorney-client relationships, including attorney independence, confidentiality, conflicts of interest, defined scopes of representation, professional responsibility and sufficient legal capacity.

That is considerably harder than simply saying:

“We have attorneys.”

And it is more expensive than telling consumers that an attorney may become involved later.

In my opinion, that helps explain why consumers sometimes see language such as:

“Can receive personal legal representation.”

Or:

“Representation when it matters most.”

But that raises an even more important question:

Why should personal legal representation be conditional?

If the legally binding obligation exists from the beginning, why shouldn’t the representation exist from the beginning too?

If representation is available only “when it matters most,” who decides when it matters most?

If a consumer “can receive” representation, who decides whether they actually do?

Can the company decide if, when, or ever it wants to provide it?

If personal legal representation is important enough to put into the marketing, I believe it should be important enough to provide to every client.

A Salesperson Can Make You a Promise. Your Lawyer Owes You a Duty.

This may be the simplest way to explain my answer.

A salesperson can explain a service.

A salesperson can tell you what the company intends to do.

A salesperson can make you a promise.

But when you become an attorney’s client, the relationship is different.

The attorney’s professional duties are owed directly to you.

That includes duties involving loyalty, confidentiality and independent professional judgment within the scope of the representation.

That is why I often put it this way:

A salesperson can make you a promise. Your lawyer owes you a professional duty to protect and prioritize your interests throughout the exit process.

When you are trying to end a legally binding timeshare obligation, I believe that distinction matters.

Why Newton Group Built Personal Legal Representation Into Its Model

After years of working with timeshare owners, I did not believe simply having attorneys around the edges of an exit-company model was enough.

If I believe the consumer is better protected with an attorney, then I believe the consumer should actually have one.

That is why we built Newton Group differently.

Every Newton Group client receives personal legal representation from the start.

Newton Group retains and pays for each client’s personal legal representation as part of its service.

Every client separately establishes a direct attorney-client relationship with a licensed attorney and receives a written Letter of Representation.

The attorney represents:

• You, the timeshare owner.
• Not Newton Group.
• Not the sales representative.
• And certainly not the resort.

The relationship is straightforward:

Newton Group retains and pays for each client’s personal legal representation. The consumer separately establishes the attorney-client relationship. The attorney represents the consumer.

Newton Group itself is not a law firm and does not provide legal advice.

We built the model this way because it reflects what I have come to believe after more than two decades working with timeshare owners:

If you are dealing with a legally binding timeshare obligation, you should have an attorney who personally represents you from the beginning.

You Might Think This Kind of Protection Would Cost More. With Newton Group, It Doesn’t.

There is an obvious question here.

If personal legal representation for every client is more expensive and more difficult to provide, how can Newton Group include it and still guarantee a better price?

The answer is the model itself.

Newton Group has common ownership in the law firm providing the legal representation, which creates efficiencies that a traditional exit-company model may not have.

Think of it like factory-direct economics.

Instead of layering an exit company, outside legal providers, additional middlemen, duplicated administration, multiple handoffs and outside markups on top of one another, our model is designed to reduce unnecessary layers and create efficiencies between the services the consumer is already paying for.

That distinction is important:

Common ownership creates efficiencies. Your separate attorney-client relationship creates personal legal representation.

The efficiencies do not replace the attorney-client relationship.

They help make it possible to provide that relationship to every client while controlling the overall cost of the service.

So you might expect that getting more protection (personal legal representation from the beginning) would mean paying more.

With Newton Group, it doesn’t.

In fact, Newton Group offers a Best Price Guarantee:

Bring us a qualifying quote from a standard timeshare exit company, and Newton Group will beat it by 20% or more, guaranteed.

That means the choice should not have to be between better protection and a better price.

With Newton Group, the better price isn’t separate from the better model.

It’s a result of it.

The Newton Group Best Price Guarantee is subject to eligibility requirements and applicable terms.

The Bottom Line: Do You Need a Lawyer to Get Out of a Timeshare?

After more than two decades in this industry, more than 30,000 families helped and more than 10,000 owner-reported experiences studied through the largest ongoing Timeshare Exit Study:

In my opinion, yes.

• You are dealing with a legally binding agreement.
• The resort has attorneys protecting its interests.
• The exit company may have attorneys protecting its interests.
• The timeshare owner should have an attorney protecting theirs.

• Not simply an attorney somewhere in the process.
• Not an attorney you may be able to speak with.
• Not representation only after an escalation.
• Not representation only “when it matters most.”
• Not representation you merely “can receive.”

Your attorney. Representing you, the timeshare owner. From the beginning.

And with Newton Group, I don’t believe consumers should have to pay more to get that protection.

Every client receives personal legal representation from the start, and Newton Group guarantees a better price than a qualifying standard timeshare exit company quote.

That is the better model we set out to build.

And that is why my answer is yes.

Gordon Newton is not an attorney and does not provide legal advice. Newton Group is not a law firm and does not provide legal advice. Legal representation is provided under a separate attorney-client engagement agreement with a licensed attorney who represents the timeshare owner. Results and timelines depend on the facts and circumstances of each matter, and no particular outcome or timeframe is guaranteed.

The Newton Group Best Price Guarantee is subject to eligibility requirements and applicable terms.