a bad roof, a bad inspector and a bad lawyer

My wife and I bought a duplex back in May. We had an inspector come look at the house and he seemed to do a pretty thorough job.

After closing, and a week worth of cleaning and painting, we spent our first night there only to find water streaming down our bedroom wall from the storm outside. We live in the downstairs unit and the upstairs unit was unoccupied so I ran upstairs and found water pouring in through the ceiling, running down the window and wall and all the way to the downstairs bedroom.

The inspector we had never physically went onto the roof to check the condition...he only viewed it from the ground. The problem is that the north side of the roof has an obstructed view due to the close proximity to the house next door. Now the inspector did say that the roof looked older and covered his end in the report by saying it would eventually need replacing. During the inspection he also told us it looked older but didn't think it was leaking and had some life left on it.

We were concerned, so we questioned the buyers about the condition of the roof (before closing) and they told us they had a roofer inspect it and he said it had around 8 years of life left. They could not provide any documentation but we (foolishly) trusted them.

A day after finding out about the leaking roof we had our own roofers (3 of them) come look at the roof (one took pictures for us). They all came to the same conclusion that the damage on the roof was caused by ice and that it was old damage not the kind that happens overnight. The plot thickened when we remembered that the wall that was leaking in the lower bedroom was the same wall that we found to be freshly painted. We questioned the sellers about that also and they said they just thought we wouldn't like the color in there. On closer inspection we also found the upstairs wall painted. We didn't see this before due to the similar color and the fact that the sellers friends were living there and had that section of wall covered with personal things.

Wisconsin has a full disclosure law so we decided to talk to a lawyer about our options. We decided that since we knew the roof was older we wouldn't ask for the full amount to replace the roof ($14,000) but since the sellers lied and led us to believe that the roof was alright and even went through the trouble to try cover it up by painting walls, we were entitled to some compensation.

Since then our lawyer has proved to be either incompetent or simply does not care about our case. We often asks ME what we should do next, offers practically no advice on how to proceed, and makes mistakes in the letters that he writes on our behalf.

My questions are, do you think we are entitled to some compensation and second, is it wise to stick with the lawyer we started with or change ships mid stream and go find a different lawyer?