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October 19th-25th, 2020 is National Estate Planning Awareness Week, so if you’ve been thinking about creating an estate plan, but still haven’t checked it off your to-do list, now is the perfect time to get it done. If you or anyone you love has yet to create a plan, contact us, as your Personal Family Lawyer®, to get your plan started today.

When it comes to putting off or refusing to create an estate plan, your mind can concoct all sorts of rationalizations: “I won’t care because I’ll be dead,” “I’m too young,” “That won’t happen to me,” or “My family will know what to do.”

But these thoughts all come from a mix of pride, denial, and above all, a lack of real education about estate planning and the consequences to your family of not planning. Once you understand exactly how planning is designed to work and what it protects against, you’ll realize there is no acceptable excuse for not having a plan.

Indeed, the first step in creating a proper plan is to thoroughly understand the potential consequences of going without one. In the event of your death or incapacity, not having a plan could be incredibly traumatic and costly for both you and your family, who will be forced to deal with the mess you’ve left behind.

While each estate and family are unique, here are some of the things most likely to happen to you and your loved ones if you fail to create a plan.

If you don’t have a plan, or if you only have a will (yes, even with a will), you’re forcing your family to go through upon your death.The legal process for settling your estate, and even if you have a will, it’s notoriously slow, costly, and public. But with no plan at all, can be a true nightmare for your loved ones.

Depending on the complexity of your estate,can take months, or even years, to complete. And like most court proceedings,can be expensive. In fact, once all of your debts, taxes, and court fees have been paid, there might be nothing left for anyone to inherit. And if there are any assets left, your family will likely have to pay hefty attorney’s fees and court costs in order to claim them.

Yet, the most burdensome part of is the frustration and anxiety it can cause your loved ones. In addition to grieving your death, planning your funeral, and contacting everyone you’re close with, your family will be stuck dealing with a crowded court system that can be challenging to navigate even in the best of circumstances. Plus, the entire affair is open to the public, which can make things all the more arduous for those you leave behind, especially if the wrong people take an interest in your family’s affairs.

That said, the expense and drama of the court system can be almost totally avoided with proper planning. Using a trust, for example, we can ensure that your assets pass directly to your family upon your death, without the need for any court intervention. As long as you have planned properly, just about everything can happen in the privacy of our office and on your family’s time.

If you die without a plan, the court will decide who inherits your assets, and this can lead to all sorts of problems. Who is entitled to your property is determined by our state’s intestate succession laws, which hinge largely upon whether you are married and if you have children.

Spouses and children are given top priority, followed by your other closest living family members. If you’re single with no children, your assets typically go to your parents and siblings, and then more distant relatives if you have no living parents or siblings. If no living relatives can be located, your assets go to the state.

But you can change all of this with a plan and ensure your assets pass the way you want.

It’s important to note that state intestacy laws only apply to blood relatives, so unmarried partners and/or close friends would get nothing. If you want someone outside of your family to inherit your property, having a plan is an absolute must.

If you’re married with children and die with no plan, it might seem like things would go fairly smoothly, but that’s not always the case. If you’re married but have children from a previous relationship, for example, the court could give everything to your spouse and leave your children out. In another instance, you might be estranged from your kids or not trust them with money, but without a plan, state law controls who gets your assets, not you.

Moreover, dying without a plan could also cause your surviving family members to get into an ugly court battle over who has the most right to your property. Or if you become incapacitated, your loved ones could even get into conflict over your medical care. You may think this would never happen to your loved ones, but we see families torn apart by it all the time, even when there’s little financial wealth involved.

We can help you create a plan that handles your assets and your care in the exact manner you wish, taking into account all of your family dynamics, so your death or incapacity won’t be any more painful or expensive for your family than it needs to be.

Most people assume estate planning only comes into play when they die, but that’s dead wrong—pun fully intended. Although planning for your eventual death is a big part of the process, it’s just as important—if not more so—to plan for your potential incapacity due to accident or illness.

If you become incapacitated and have no plan in place, your family would have to petition the court to appoint a guardian or conservator to manage your affairs. This process can be extremely costly, time consuming, and traumatic for everyone involved. In fact, incapacity can be a much greater burden for your loved ones than your death.

We, as your Personal Family Lawyer®, can help you put planning vehicles in place that grant the person(s) of your choice the immediate authority to make your medical, financial, and legal decisions for you in the event of your incapacity. We can also implement planning strategies that provide specific guidelines detailing how you want your medical care to be managed, including critical end-of-life decisions.

Given the potentially dire consequences for both you and your family, you can’t afford to put off creating your estate plan any longer. As your Personal Family Lawyer®, we will guide you step-by-step through the planning process to ensure you’ve taken all the proper precautions to spare your loved ones from needless frustration, conflict, and expense.

That said, the biggest benefit you stand to gain from putting a plan in place is the peace of mind that comes from knowing your loved ones will be provided and cared for no matter what happens to you. Don’t wait another day—contact us, as your Personal Family Lawyer®, to schedule an appointment, so you can finally check this urgent task off your to-do list.

Proper estate planning can keep your family out of conflict, out of court, and out of the public eye. If you’re ready to create a comprehensive estate plan, contact us to schedule your Family Wealth Planning Session. Even if you already have a plan in place, we will review it and help you bring it up to date to avoid heartache for your family. Schedule online today.

While starting and building a successful business is immensely challenging, selling one can be almost as difficult. Many business owners are surprised by just how time consuming and laborious the sales process is. Fortunately, tons of time and effort can be saved simply by avoiding these four common pitfalls:

You certainly wouldn’t plant a “For Sale” sign in your yard without preparing your home for the market, yet many people basically do just this by not taking the proper steps to prep their business before attempting to sell. On average, it takes two to four years to sell a company, so this isn’t something you should do on the fly.

Just gathering all of the necessary documentation—financials, business history, profit forecasts—is a massive undertaking and must be done before you can even set your price. Preparation is also key to closing a sale. If buyers see you’ve done a thorough job preparing your sales portfolio, this should convince them the business has been run in an equally efficient manner.

We can be an invaluable asset in helping prepare your business for sale. We’ll guide you through the documentation process, ensuring you have all of the necessary records needed to wow potential buyers.

Pricing a business can be sensitive. The business is your baby, and you want to see a healthy return on the time, energy, and money you’ve put into building it. However, emotion has no bearing on a business’s value. Only quantifiable criteria like cash flow, current market prices, and growth forecasts should influence pricing. For optimal valuation, get the objective opinion of a third-party appraiser.

And don’t forget to take into account the total cost of the sale. If you set the price without considering the amount of taxes and fees that will be deducted, you could end up with much less money than expected.

We’ll help you accurately assess financials and tax obligations for the sale, while also providing trusted advice on any legal ramifications that might affect the process.

It might be tempting to sell to someone you know—a friend, relative, or colleague—but camaraderie has no part in a sale either. To choose the right person, pre-qualify all potential buyers and agree to share business records with them only if they sign a confidentiality agreement. This will ensure anyone you deal with is actually serious about buying.

Evaluate several qualified buyers; don’t just sell to the first person who comes knocking. Having a pool of buyers not only provides backup if a sale falls through, it also offers leverage when negotiating terms.

We can help you evaluate qualified buyers as well as draft legal documents like confidentiality agreements and other contracts.

You might assume that you automatically own the IP rights to the work your employees and/or independent contractors create while employed by you. However, unless you’ve had that individual sign a contract that explicitly states that you own all rights to any IP they create, using what’s called a “work for hire” clause, you might not actually own any of it.

Be sure all of your employees and/or contractors sign a contract stating that the company owns the rights to everything they create while working for you. And if your team members have access to any trade secrets, make sure they sign non-disclosure and non-competition agreements. Note, there is no legal registration for trade secrets, so an NDA is the only legal way to keep your proprietary systems and formulas a secret.

If you think you may be at risk here, contact us immediately.

A trademark protects your company’s brand name from being counterfeited, but it only protects certain aspects of your work. Trademarks are used to protect a word, phrase, symbol, design, or other distinguishing feature that identifies your specific product or service. Yet that protection doesn’t cover everything about your brand.

For instance, you could own a brick-and-mortar store that sells unique 3-D seascape art that’s called “C-Scapes 2.0” and have a trademark for the business name and logo. But someone else could still buy the legal rights to the URL “C-Scapes2.0.com,” unless you do it first. This is why it’s so important to secure all IP rights and domains as soon as you develop the idea, or you could be extorted by trademark and patent trolls, who monitor IP registration, waiting for a clueless business owner to put off securing all rights for their company.

Unlike copyright owners, who can pick and choose when to defend their copyrights, trademark holders must make efforts to enforce their trademark or risk losing it. While forcing a business to enforce their trademark might sound harsh, it’s designed to ensure that the foundational value of trademarks doesn’t become diluted.

Indeed, the entire point of having a trademark is to distinguish your company as its source, so allowing a bunch of people to use your trademarked logo devalues the protection. And it doesn’t matter who the offender is—a multinational corporation or your 12-year-old nephew—or if they even compete with you, you have to enforce your rights.

However, enforcing your trademark doesn’t mean you have to take the party to court. There are numerous options for enforcement available, from a polite cease and desist letter to requiring the offender to pay a nominal licensing fee, so you don’t have to be a total hard-ass about enforcement. In fact, we often write letters that inspire resolution as well as ongoing joint venturing to infringers if our clients want that. And we can do that for you, too.

With so many things to deal with when starting a business, it can be tempting to think that protecting your IP is something you can put off. But this can be a huge mistake. When it comes to IP, especially patents, you absolutely must file for protection as soon as the idea becomes a reality, or you could lose all rights to that idea.

For example, the U.S. patent office recently changed from a “first to invent” system to a “first to file” one, so patents are actually now awarded based on who filed first, not who came up with the idea first. As soon as you take the first steps to bring a business or product idea to life—incorporating, obtaining business licenses, or initiating production of a product—you should identify which aspects of your business need IP protection and file for a patent, copyright, or trademark. Of course, you’ve hopefully researched your idea first to make sure someone hasn’t already beat you to the punch!

Not to mention, you’re probably putting a lot of investment capital into building your website. But did you know that you may not even own your website? Yes, that’s right, without the proper agreements in place, you may not own the source code of your own website! Have us review any agreements you enter into when you create anything online or offline, and make sure your investments in intellectual property are protected.

Because intellectual property law can be quite complex and confusing, it’s vital that you contact us as your Creative Business Lawyer® to ensure all aspects of your IP are safeguarded. We’re well-versed in the latest IP laws and will work with you to develop a comprehensive strategy to protect all of your assets, so you can focus on taking your company and brand to the next level.

We offer a complete spectrum of legal services for businesses and can help you make the wisest choices on how to deal with your business throughout life and in the event of your death. We also offer a LIFT Start-Up Session™ or a LIFT Audit for an ongoing business, which includes a review of all the legal, financial, and tax systems you need for your business. Call us today to schedule. Or, schedule online.

Have you ever felt that the unbreakable bond you once had with your children is seriously eroding? It can feel as if the very foundation of your relationship is falling apart.

It may feel like you can no longer communicate with your kids. No matter how hard you try, your once-cooperative child is impossible to get through to, much less control. Their previous desire for your attention, connection, and affection has been replaced with distance, silence, and coldness.

This detachment leaves you feeling helpless and betrayed. In order to regain your influence, you try using the latest trendy parenting techniques, but nothing seems to break the deadlock. Feeling utterly powerless to regain your connection, you fall back on authoritarian methods of discipline you previously avoided.

But your attempts at discipline only seem to make  things worse. Rather than bringing your children closer,  they become even more defiant. Eventually, the gap grows so wide it seems totally unbridgeable.

If this sounds familiar, you might want to listen to Dr. Gabor Maté. Rather than offering a quick-fix solution to this complex issue, Maté combines the latest scientific research with his own 20 years of experience as a family physician to empower parents to earn back their children’s love and loyalty.

In numerous presentations, interviews, and the book Hold On To Your Kids: Why Parents Need to Matter More Than Peers, Maté explains the causes of this disconnect and describes how parents can reclaim their role as their children’s primary mentors and role models.

Maté posits that the main reason for children’s detachment is due to a growing lack of intimacy in the parent-child relationship. The foundation for parenting is centered around what developmental psychologists call an attachment relationship. An attachment relationship is based on children’s innate desire to connect with and belong to their parents.

This attachment forms the entire context for child rearing, and even the best parenting skills in the world can’t compensate for a lack of such a connection.

“The secret of parenting is not in what a parent does, but rather who the parent is to a child,” says Maté. “When a child seeks contact and closeness with us, we become empowered as a nurturer, a comforter, a guide, a model, a teacher, or a coach.”

As long as the child desires to stay attached—emotionally connected and close—a deep sense of psychological intimacy will naturally arise. Above all else, this bond sets the stage for the parent to be the primary source of influence over the child’s identity, values, and personality.

“People think parenting comes from their responsibility, strength, and wisdom, but it doesn’t come from that,” says Maté. “It comes from the desire of the child to belong to you.”

Children who lack this connection with their parents or primary caregivers become extremely difficult to raise and even teach. Given this, Maté stresses the fundamental goal for parents is to ensure that their children want to connect and have a close relationship with them. This does not mean just giving your children whatever they want, but instead giving them what they likely need most—more time and connection with you.

“The starting point and primary goal in all of our connections with children ought to be the relationship itself, not conduct or behavior,” notes Maté.

Children will always try to distance themselves from their parents as a natural way of exerting their independence, and parents have traditionally remained their primary source of influence. What’s changed, according to Maté, is that in recent decades, a mix of social, economic, and cultural changes have seriously eroded parents’ ability to remain the chief-orienting influence in their children’s lives.

“Children’s attachments to parents are no longer getting the support required from culture and society,” says Maté. “It’s not a lack of love or parenting know-how, but the erosion of the attachment context that makes our parenting ineffective.”

For a variety of reasons, often centered around economics, many parents are no longer able to provide the level of attention and intimacy needed for the relationship with their kids to remain healthy and strong. And because children have a deep-seated psychological need for such attachment, they seek out another source to fill this void.

“If kids have an attachment void, their brains can’t handle it. So they seek to fill the void with their relationship with their peer group, which becomes their role model and mentor,” says Maté.

Following WWII, children have increasingly formed strong attachment relationships with their peers that compete with the bond traditionally filled by parents. These relationships can seriously erode parents’ influence and authority.

“They [children] are not manageable, teachable, or maturing because they no longer take their cues from us,” says Maté. “Instead, children are being brought up by other immature children who cannot possibly guide them to maturity.”

Maté notes that it’s perfectly normal and healthy for children to have close relationships with their peers. The problem arises when these relationships supersede the ones they have with their parents.

“The most damaging of the competing attachments that undermine parental authority and love is the increased bonding of our children with their peers,” says Maté. “The bond with their peers becomes their primary attachment relationship: the relationships they care most about, have the highest emotional stake in, and are the guiding light for their behaviors, culture, norms, and so on.”

For many children today, peers have replaced parents as the most influential force in creating the core of their personalities. When children look to other children to serve as their role models and mentors, this can have dramatic effects on their psychological development. And as we’ll see in part two, in the worst cases, the consequences can be fatal.

Proper estate planning can keep your family out of conflict, out of court, and out of the public eye. If you’re ready to create a comprehensive estate plan, contact us to schedule your Family Wealth Planning Session. Even if you already have a plan in place, we will review it and help you bring it up to date to avoid heartache for your family. Schedule online today.

Since the age of 16, when she burst onto the charts with her debut single, “…Hit Me Baby One More Time,” Britney Spears has been one of the world’s most famous and beloved pop stars. Yet despite her massive fame and fortune, Britney, who is now 39, has never truly had full control over her own life.

As most familiar with pop culture know by now, Britney has been living under a conservatorship for the past 13 years. Also known as “adult guardianship,” a conservatorship is a legal structure in which the court granted Britney’s father, Jaime Spears, and other individuals nearly complete control over her legal, financial, and personal decisions. The conservatorship was initially established in February 2008 after Britney suffered a mental breakdown, which resulted in her being briefly hospitalized.

A Total Loss of Control

Back in 2008, the court appointed Britney’s father and attorney Andrew Wallet as her co-conservators, as Britney was deemed mentally unfit to care for herself. The arrangement was only meant to be temporary, but in October of that year, the conservatorship was made long-term, and her father has remained in nearly complete control of Britney’s life ever since.

Under the conservatorship, Britney’s father has the power to restrict her visitors; he is in charge of arranging and approving her visits with her own children; he has the authority to make her medical decisions; and he has the final say in all of her business deals, including when she works, and the complete authority over all of her financial matters.

As it stands now, Britney’s current mental-health status remains unclear, and we can’t be sure whether or not she still requires someone to help her manage her financial and business affairs. But what is abundantly clear is that given the chance, Britney would have undoubtedly preferred to have some say in not only who should be in charge of making decisions on her behalf during her incapacity, but also how those decisions should be made.

Yet because Britney did not create legal documents indicating who should make decisions for her if she could not make decisions for herself, a judge decided for her—and as you’ll read below, this has resulted in immense trauma for Britney and destroyed her relationship with her father. With this in mind, here in this series of articles, we will first discuss the latest details on Britney’s conservatorship and the impact the arrangement has had on the pop star’s life and career. From there, we’ll discuss how you can prevent something similar from happening to you and your loved ones using proactive estate planning and our Family Wealth Planning process.

Years Of Abuse And Conflict

Although there has been widespread speculation that Britney’s conservatorship was abusive, the exact details of her conservatorship have been kept private. Moreover, until very recently, Britney had never spoken publicly about her life under the arrangement.

Britney’s father and others involved with the conservatorship have consistently maintained the arrangement saved Britney from herself and others looking to exploit her when she was at her lowest point. They described how the conservatorship helped pull Britney out of debt and allowed her to earn a fortune estimated to be worth nearly $60 million. Plus, representatives for the conservatorship have noted that Britney could move to end the conservatorship whenever she wanted.

However, two shocking developments within the past few weeks finally revealed just how much Britney has suffered under the conservatorship and how she has fought unsuccessfully for years to regain control of her life from her father. The first was a report published by the New York Times on June 22.

According to confidential court records obtained by the newspaper, Britney had expressed serious opposition to her conservatorship as early as 2014, and on multiple occasions, the pop icon pushed for her father to be removed from his position. The very next day in a public court hearing on June 23, Britney finally broke her silence, and what she described was stunning.

During an emotional 24-minute speech delivered via Zoom, Britney pleaded with Judge Brenda Penny to end the conservatorship under which she claimed she has endured years of abuse and exploitation, including having to take a powerful mood stabilizer that makes her feel drunk, being compelled to work while seriously ill, and being forced to remain on birth control, so she can’t have more children. (Read a full transcript of Britney’s testimony)

In response, Britney’s father vehemently denies any wrongdoing and insists he’s acting in his daughter’s best interests. In fact, a few days later, his lawyers filed a petition requesting the court investigate Britney’s allegations of abuse. According to the petition, if Britney’s claims prove true, then “corrective action must be taken,” and if not, then the conservatorship “can continue its course.”

A week later, Judge Penny denied Britney’s request to remove her father as conservator. However, the judge’s ruling was only in response to a filing by Britney’s lawyer made in November 2020 to have a wealth management company, Bessemer Trust, take over as sole conservator, and was not in response to Britney’s impassioned testimony. As it turns out, Britney’s court-appointed lawyer, Samuel Ingham, has yet to file a formal petition to terminate the conservatorship, but the judge said she would be open to such a filing.

According to CNN, Britney has since instructed Ingraham to immediately file the necessary paperwork in order to formally terminate the conservatorship once and for all. If filed, the judge could rule on Britney’s petition and her father’s request for an investigation in the next court hearing on the conservatorship, which is scheduled for next week on July 14.

A Broken System

Britney’s story highlights the real potential for abuse that exists within the conservatorship and guardianship system. In fact, as we’ve covered in previous articles, there have been dozens of highly publicized reports in recent years involving corrupt professional guardians, who exploit those under their care for their own financial gain. Yet, in those cases, the victims have nearly all been elderly, and their abusers were strangers. But Britney’s situation makes it clear that people of any age can fall prey to these restrictive legal arrangements, and the abusers can even be your own family members.

Furthermore, and perhaps the most puzzling part of the whole situation, is why someone as young and active as Britney is still living under a conservatorship. Conservatorships and guardianships are typically used to protect the elderly and mentally disabled who are incapable of making their own decisions and caring for themselves, and they often remain in effect until the person dies.

Although Britney may have initially needed the conservatorship to protect her from her own poor decisions and others looking to take advantage of her in the aftermath of her breakdown in 2008, since then, the Grammy winner has worked almost nonstop and earned millions of dollars. In fact, over the past decade during which she was deemed “incapable of making her own decisions,” Britney has released four albums, headlined multiple world tours, performed nearly 250 shows in a Las Vegas residency, and served as a judge on the TV show “The X Factor.”

That said, due to the private nature of her conservatorship and the fact that Britney has never fully disclosed the specifics of her diagnosis, we don’t know the full circumstances of her mental health. Although there have been rumors and speculation that Britney is suffering from bipolar disorder, this has never been substantiated, and her medical records are sealed.

What’s more, although it was reported in 2019 that Britney checked herself into a mental health facility and was prescribed lithium, an older medication that’s used to treat bipolar disorder, according to court records obtained by the New York Times, this wasn’t entirely true. In 2019, Britney testified that she was forced into the facility against her will, and during her most recent testimony, she told the judge that she was forced to take the lithium against her wishes as well.

In the end, if Britney does petition to terminate her conservatorship, she will need to prove to the court that she currently possesses the capacity to handle her own life, health, and financial choices. In order to do this, however, Britney will almost certainly have to undergo another mental health evaluation, which would likely involve a court hearing and testimony from mental health professionals.

In an interview with the culture and music website Vulture, Tamar Arminak, a conservatorship attorney who worked on a similar conservatorship involving 27-year-old actress Amanda Bynes, said that the process to prove Britney’s capacity would likely involve a “mini-trial” to determine whether the conservatorship continues to be in the singer’s best interest.

“You have to present evidence and show a changed circumstance,” said Arminak. “You will have to have testimony from doctors, psychiatrists, therapists, and witnesses who will testify for you that you shouldn’t be under this conservatorship.”

Unfortunately, undergoing yet another mental health evaluation is something Britney is hesitant to do. Indeed, in her recent testimony, she made this point clear. “I truly believe this conservatorship is abusive… I want to end the conservatorship without being evaluated,” Britney told the judge.

According to Vanity Fair, a source close to Britney said the reason for Britney’s reluctance to undergo another mental health examination is due to the fact that she has had such poor experiences over the years with the doctors hired by her father.

“She doesn’t have much trust for the doctors that she has worked with so far,” the source said. “She feels like they have failed her.”

The source went on to say that Britney’s reluctance to be evaluated is also one of the reasons her lawyer has yet to formally file the petition to end the conservatorship. After her past experiences with mental health professionals, it’s understandable that Britney would be hesitant to trust yet another doctor hired by her father or appointed by the court.

However, if Britney wants to finally be free and have full control over her life, that might be the only choice she has.

Avoid Britney’s Fate With Incapacity Planning

Whether it’s mental illness, age-related dementia, or a serious accident, we are all powerless to prevent the potential for incapacity. However, with the proper estate planning, you can at least have control over how your life, healthcare, and assets will be managed if something does happen. Moreover, such planning can also prevent your family from enduring the bitter conflict and expense that can result when you leave control over your life in the hands of the court like Britney did.

Working with us, your Personal Family Lawyer®, we can put an array of estate planning vehicles in place that would make it practically impossible for a conservator or legal guardian to ever be appointed—or even need to be appointed—against your wishes. In part two, we’ll outline those options in more detail, but to learn more, contact us today.

We’ll continue with part two in this series on Britney Spears’ conservatorship and how you can avoid the potential for abuse, conflict, and expense of court-ordered conservatorship using estate planning.

Proper estate planning can keep your family out of conflict, out of court, and out of the public eye. If you’re ready to create a comprehensive estate plan, contact us to schedule your Family Wealth Planning Session. Even if you already have a plan in place, we will review it and help you bring it up to date to avoid heartache for your family. Schedule online today.