 Just because you're advocating being aggressive, being a shark, being a pit bull, doesn't necessarily mean you're getting a result. And that's why we're here. We're results-oriented people. So Scott, welcome to the UR Lawyer podcast. Thanks for having me, Kyla. Oh, of course. So you have a great background, lots of experience. Would you share some of your experience in education with the audience? Sure. Yeah. Wisconsin, born and raised, went to the University of Wisconsin. I'm a proud badger. I attended law school here in sunny Southern California at the University of San Diego, Go Terraro's, for the few of us out there. And then I've been practicing for the last 20 years. This is actually the 20th anniversary of my bar passage. So two decades in this space and couldn't be happier. Yeah, that's really exciting. So have you always been practicing the same type of law for the entire 20 years? I've done a bunch of different things over the course of my career, but there is a consistent thread throughout my career of doing probate litigation. Okay. So Scott, you mentioned being from Wisconsin and now you live in California. Did you take the Wisconsin bar as well as the California bar or only California? Only California. So no plans to ever go back to Wisconsin or what? It's a great place to visit, but they are having a blizzard as we speak. So I came out here chasing sunshine and didn't look back those 25 years ago, I think. And it's a great place to grow up. The summers are gorgeous. The people are lovely, but it's cold for a large swath of the year. So I am in Ohio, so I am pro-code. Very pro-code. My fiance is also from Ohio, so I've spent time in the Holy Land. As a badger, I am not a Buckeye fan, sorry for any of your listeners who might be many, but generally, I'll support the big time. Okay. Well, I have a pretty good split because I went to law school in Louisiana, so I appreciate and I'll see you soon and everything. Okay. So I love talking to probate attorneys or litigators because they're always like, probate will touch everyone at some point in their life, right? Very true. Do you have that same view of it and what is it that you enjoy about probate litigation? I do have that same view. It is something that touches every family in some way, shape or form, whether it's a parent, a grandparent, aunt, uncle, brother, sister. And what I love about it is you have the opportunity to help people. You truly have an opportunity to find people who are scared, mourning the loss of someone they care about deeply and you get to help them through a very difficult time in their lives and leave them in a better place than you found them. And you can't say that about every practice area. So we really enjoy putting our arm around our clients and walking them through, you know, some emotionally difficult processes. Now, probate planning is for anyone who doesn't know, if someone dies without a will, then there's a whole probate process that you go into. If you die with a will, there's also an entire probate process, right? People think, oh, you get a will? That's it, right? Everything is done. How could you be a visionary in that space? Like how can you change that process? Great question. And I think there is a lot of confusion about it out in the consumer marketplace because we'll get people who call and they'll say, you know, my brother's the executor of the trust or, you know, I'm the trustee of the will. And obviously, those things are incorrect. You have an executor of a will and you have a trustee of a trust, but people use them interchangeably because they don't necessarily understand how they work. And I think if you go back historically and look at the use and utilization of wills and trusts in this country, you're only going back 20, 30 years, right? Really where our system transitioned from a pension-based retirement plan to a 401k IRA privately funded retirement system. And with that came the proliferation of planning, wills, trusts, etc. So it's a relatively newer concept. And so people aren't really that familiar, although they're becoming more and more familiar every day, frankly. And so, you know, talking through what a probate is without a will, that is what is known as an intestate probate proceeding. It's intestate because there is no will. There's no document to guide the court, in which case you simply rely on each state's intestacy laws, what the probate code in that state says is going to happen with the assets. And you follow that process through the probate court. Similarly, with a will, it follows the same process, except you have a will that is going to dictate who is in charge, who is going to administer the estate and what's going to happen with the assets, as long as it's covered in that will. And then separately, you have a trust, which is essentially a private administration. So you don't have to go through the probate court process. You don't have to go through that public process. It can all happen privately and be administered cleanly, cost effectively by whomever is appointed as the trustee or trustees. Somewhere in the middle, because I know there are some jurisdictions out there like Texas where they say you don't need a trust because they have expedited probate proceedings where it's not going to be super lengthy and it's not going to be super costly. And so you don't see the proliferation in the use of trusts in those jurisdictions like you do in jurisdictions like California, where most of the planning includes a will and the will simply pours any assets that are not already in the trust into the trust. And then the trustee administers the trust and distributes the assets according to the distributive provisions of that trust. So if they're all intertwined and then the questions about what about the power of attorney and an advanced healthcare directive and all those other things, but those are really pre-death as opposed to post-death. Yeah. So you gave a lot of really good examples in different states and different jurisdictions. Do you deal with probate issues in different states or do you just remember all of this from law school and studying for the bar exam? No, we have offices in Florida, Texas, Kansas, Missouri and California and we have relationships with firms in pretty much every other state in the country. Because this is all we do and if it's something that we can't do because we're not licensed in the state, we still want to be able to help people. That's our number one core value is lead with empathy and we define that as we're here to help people. So even if it's not us, we always try to help people find the next best thing, at least until we're in those markets. Understandable. So which office is the home base? Is it California? Los Angeles is the home office. Okay. All right, very cool. Is there any jurisdiction that is especially difficult with probate practicing and estate planning? They all have their nuances. That's a lawyer answer. I love it. That's like, it depends. It does. It does depend on what you're trying to do and how you're trying to do it. And I guess the people on the East Coast would say, eek to a California administration. People in Texas say, why do you need a trust? We out here say, why don't you have a trust? Just do it all privately. You don't need the court at all. And it really depends on what you're trying to accomplish. The estate planning community is always trying to thread the smallest needle with sometimes the biggest thread. And it's difficult, especially as mobile as we are as a society. And we saw a lot of that over the last several years with the pandemic where people were moving out of urban areas, moving to places where they had more space, places where their kids could go to school, etc. So you've seen a lot of mobility and you're seeing it again now where people are starting to come back. So it really depends. Okay. So I know you can't give legal advice because you're not my lawyer. You're not the lawyer for anybody that's listening. But would you give one example of the benefit of having a trust even as a young person? And I say that because when I hear trust, I think I need to be extremely wealthy and have all of this stuff to pass on. So I guess the better question is, is that a myth? And would you give an example of why someone, why anyone could really have a trust? The simplest answer to that, Kylie, and I think it's a great question. And it really comes down to this. And I've been having this discussion for the last couple of decades with clients, with referral sources, people in the community. It really boils down to do you want the most cost-effective, efficient manner of administering your affairs after you're gone. Is that the legacy you want to leave for your family? Because if not, then leave them with a probate, right? Leave them without a will, right? Force them to go to court for a year, a year and a half, two years and have them scratch their head and say, I thought mom or dad really had their stuff together. And I guess they didn't, right? Why are we having to do this? My dad, my mom, they always had everything so buttoned up and I don't understand why they left it like this. And the cost to do a standard estate plan, including a trust, is relatively affordable when you weigh the cost of going to probate court, doing those filings, doing the administration through the court, even if it's an expedited proceeding in some of the other jurisdictions, you're still having to go through that process as opposed to what can be a private process, can be done without court supervision at all, and it can be really efficient. Yeah. So just to piggyback on that, for everyone that's listening, if you want a trust, if you're curious, what is this about, please do some research and look into it, right? My husband and I looked into it for a daughter, she's just two, but I was like, I don't want there to be this big jumble, right? And also I'm a rebel. I was one of the people who got life insurance and they were like, you don't have kids, you don't have a spouse, why do you have life insurance? Because I don't want someone to have to deal with the bill, if anything happens to me, right? So if you're listening and you're curious about trust, probate planning, please look into it and also look at Scott's website. We'll make sure we link all of that stuff in the description if you're in one of the states where they're offering services, okay? That's great. Yeah, we try to do a lot of educational videos and things like that. They're all on the website, so. Okay, great. So everyone a quick break for me to just say, if you are watching right now, thank you for participating with you are a lawyer on YouTube. If you're not watching, why not? Finish listening to the podcast episode and then go to YouTube and take a look. We are talking about estate planning and probates here on the you are a lawyer podcast with Scott, Ron, okay? So Scott, let's get into your background. Did you plan on practicing this type of law when you were in law school? I think the short answer Kyla is no. Okay. I think I thought in law school that I wanted to be a corporate transactional lawyer, an M&A lawyer. I didn't think I wanted to be a litigator. I think litigators had a certain reputation for being, frankly, being just difficult people. And that wasn't me, that wasn't who I wanted to be. But I had the good fortune at my first firm of being raised as a young lawyer and mentor to come to appreciate that you could be you. And you didn't have to be one of those difficult personalities. And it's a bit funny because I think over the last 20 years, as I've come to experience some of those difficult personalities, we often say when clients will call and say, you know, I want someone aggressive, I want a pit bull, I want a shark. We'll say, so you want it to cost twice as much and take twice as long. And they'll say, no, no, no, no, I don't want that. And I say, no, what you want is a good result and you want it sooner for less legal spend. And they say, yeah, yeah, that's what I want. Because the reality is, is if you're if you're difficult, people don't want to deal with you, right? And then it ends up where everything's a letter writing campaign, right? Everything has to be negotiated. Everything has to be fought over. And it's simply a waste of everyone's time and money. If you're if you're a good lawyer, and you're up against a good lawyer, those are usually the cases that you're able to get a result in more quickly for less money and less time. Because everybody knows what the pluses and what the minuses are. And you're able to come to some sort of resolution, which puts you in a position to put your client in a position to move on with their life, which is what they really want. Absolutely. One of the things I love that you mentioned was, do you want the pit bull or the shark? Because a lot of times new lawyers are called baby sharks. When you say you want to be a litigator, they're like, oh, you're a pit bull, right? You want to go to court, you want to fight it out with someone. And it's like, it doesn't have to be that way. Litigation does not have to be adversarial, even though you are on opposite sides of the table, right? Yes. Oftentimes we'll work with, again, if it's an experienced lawyer who knows what they're doing on the other side, we'll very quickly come to what we can agree upon and what we can agree upon and what we cannot agree upon. Those are the issues that we'll fight over. But again, you don't have to be aggressive. There's this snowmer in the consumer world that aggression equals success. And it simply doesn't. Being strategic, being tactical, being thoughtful, and executing equals success. But that's not aggression. We have one of our other core values here, Kyla, is what we call zealous efficacy, which is a play on the well-known legalism that is zealous advocacy. And we spun it to zealous efficacy because what we've seen over the course of the past several decades is lawyers who are advocating for their client, not necessarily advocating for the best interest of their client. Just because you're advocating, being aggressive, being a shark, being a pit bull, doesn't necessarily mean you're getting a result. And that's why we're here. We're results-oriented people. We're a results-oriented firm. And that's what we want to do. We want to be zealously efficacious for you. We don't just want to advocate for you, just to advocate. Yeah. And so that sounds so simple, right? Zealous efficacy. But I can imagine that is very beneficial when it comes to probate matters because they are very emotional matters. Really dramatic. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. So Scott, when you're in law school, the big thing is do you want to do transactional work, which is corporate law dealing with papers? Or do you want to be a litigator, which could be, you know, probate litigation, typically it's criminal litigation, being a prosecutor, things like that, which is going to court. So did you have any experience in your kind of mock trial litigation type things? Or did you avoid all of that in law school because you were planning to do transactional work? So I had an opportunity to clerk at a couple of different firms in law school. So I got exposed to some transactional, some litigation, but it was really when I got my first law firm job out of law school that I got exposed to litigators who showed me that it was okay to be a good person, that it was okay to be strategic and tactical. And in fact, that's really what we're duty bound to do, right? We're not duty bound to pound on the table, right, or yell and scream. Some people unfortunately never learned that. So it was really that experience. And I had the opportunity at that firm to spend part of my time doing corporate transactional work and part of my time doing litigation. So I got to see both practice areas at the same time. And what I found was that I really enjoyed the chess match, the strategy that is litigation, not that transactional work isn't problem solving it is. Estate planning is problem solving, but it's just a different skill set. And I came to learn that my skill set lies in the courtroom, in problem solving in this space as opposed to problem solving in that space. Yeah. So would you describe a typical day as a probate litigator? Because to me, I just can't even imagine. Are you guys just arguing about a will, a lack of will, or do you get to litigation even if there's a trust or what's a typical day like for you? Sure. Most of our days are filled with time spent with clients and interviewing witnesses and estate planners and trying to find out what transpired. We're investigators, we're trying to figure out what happened with mom, dad, grandma, grandma, aunts, uncles, estate. Why are the documents that we're looking at the final set of documents? Why are those bona fide? Or why are they not? Were they constructed and executed at a time when they had capacity? Were they executed at a time like in one of our cases when auntie was suffering or had suffered a catastrophic stroke that left her in a permanent vegetative state? We spend most of our day doing fact investigation and then taking those facts, applying those facts to the probate laws to advance our client's position, whether that's helping the court to understand and help the other side to understand that the documents not valid for undue influence or incapacity, fraud, etc., or helping the court on the other side to understand that, no, this is what they wanted. This is how we know they wanted it. It's a consistent pattern of planning. They use the same estate planner. They had a relationship with this person for 20 years and really helping to paint that picture. I've come to relate probate litigation to impressionist paintings over the past several decades because it's really rarely other than the case I told you about where the aunt was in a permanent vegetative state where she very clearly couldn't have signed anything or consented. It's really a million little brush strokes that create the picture that the court's going to see. It's our job to go out and gather those paints, pick up those brushes, and be able to paint that picture of what the case should look like and the picture that the judge should see. So I love this. This is one of the best explanations of probate planning that I've heard in a very long time because I remember being in law school and you learned there could be duress, there could be a new influence, was there issue of capacity, but I have never seen the other side and where you would be investigating to say there wasn't duress, there wasn't undue influence and that's why this will is valid. Correct. So I think this is really great and for everyone that's listening if you are a law student please pay attention to family law. In Louisiana we had a course called Successions and that was where we learned wills and estates. So if you're still in school please pay attention to this because it will affect you. If you are a practicing lawyer and you're thinking wow that sounds interesting, consider this. I've never heard probate planning and probate litigation described this way and I think you're humanizing the practice, right? You're not just trying to get a portion of the estate when everything is cleared. You're actually trying to make sure that the wishes of the family are carried on and I think that's great. Yeah we're here to help families protect the legacy that was intended and it is it's a very human practice area. I think I'm obviously biased being in this practice area but I think it's the best, most rewarding area for the reasons I started talking about when we started the podcast which is you get to help people and you get to take some very difficult emotional issues and do the diligence to figure out whether those issues are real issues or whether they're feelings and if their feelings help your client work through those but also help them understand that the facts simply don't substantiate those things. Either way you're going to help your client get to a place not only financially, legally, but emotionally where they can move on with their lives and focus on the rest of their life which is really what their legacy should be. Yeah absolutely and I believe that I can hear the sincerity coming across from you. So Scott is there anything else that you would like to share with the audience about the type of law that you practice or how you've enjoyed it for 20 years? All I can say is that this is a really wonderful area to practice in. I feel blessed every day to be able to help the good people that we work with whether they're beneficiaries, heirs of a will or trust, or the fiduciaries, the trustees, the executors, the administrators, the professional fiduciaries we work with, the institutional fiduciaries that we work with. Everybody in this space is really genuinely trying to get to a place where we can figure out what legacy our loved one intended and then how to implement that in the fairest possible way and put people in a place again where they can go on living their lives. So if anybody has any interest or questions in this area, I absolutely geek out on it and I'm happy to talk about it because I think it's really powerful. I think it's a really human space and I'm always happy to jump in and consult, advise, and we do a lot of that, frankly, nationally and internationally. So I was happy to have a conversation about this stuff. I love it. Absolutely. And I will make sure that I link all of Scott's information, any of the firm's information and social media pages in the show description notes as well as the YouTube notes so that you can reach out, learn about this exciting and really interesting area of law and find out more about Scott. I appreciate your time and thank you for being a guest with you, our lawyer. Thanks again. Pleasure to meet you. All right. Bye.