Do you have any particular expertise on the top of wills and/or powers of attorney?
Do you have a will?
If yes, did a lawyer help you to write your will?
If Yes, and if you have a spouse or partner, what percentage of your assets have you left to him or her in your will?
If you have children, what percentage of your assets have you left to them in your will?
Do you have any views with respect to the gift tax or the tax laws in general that would affect your ability to be fair and impartial in this case?
These are questions for prospective jurors who will hear the case against Anthony Marshall, charged with looting his mother Brooke Astor's estate. Also charged is her attorney who did some estate planning for her.
I doubt that many of the prospective jurors have views about the gift tax or are even aware of it. Anyway it's going to be an interesting trial.
Friday, April 3, 2009
No Peers
Sealing Guardianship court proceedings? That's scary business. Guardianship can completely strip all individual rights from a person. It is completely discomforting that the proceeding could be done, in whole or part, away from the view of the press and public. George Hearst Jr. asked San Luis Obispo Superior Court to seal information regarding his twin sister Phoebe Cooke Hearst, and his efforts to take conservatorship of her estimated $2 billion estate.
The first time he was rejected; the second time the judge made a tentative ruling on to redact or seal from the public information on a case-by-case basis.
Cooke's brother claims that she is unable to handle her finances making her prey to elder abuse.
Cooke, whose husband Jack died in September, has fought the actions to take over her estate, saying her brother and the others do not have sufficient facts to prove she is mismanaging her assets or that she is being financially abused by others, according to her court filings.
In an interview with The Tribune, Cooke told them that she does need financial guidance now that her husband is dead, but is completely against her brother fulfilling this role. They have had a strained relationship for years.
She also told them that she wished "the court proceedings and resulting information be open to the press to help her receive a fair hearing."
Pain but no Gain
Patients who never talked about their end-of-life wishes were more likely to be resuscitated, intubated or put in intensive care — or all of the above. Patients who had had those conversations generally opted for comfort, or palliative, care at home or in a hospice at much lower cost. Aggressive, expensive care was found to inflict more suffering, but not extend life. According to this item in the NY Times called "At the End of Life, Denial Comes at a Price."Talk to your loved one's about end-of-life issues before illness occurs. See an estate planning attorney and get a health care power of attorney that allows someone you trust to make medical decisions for you when you can't. Complete a Medical Directive that describes the kinds of care you want and don't want. Utah has a standard form for Medical Directives. Every Utahn should have one. You can get it here.
Recession's Grave Consequences
Lots of news articles on how the funeral industry is suffering in this economy - more people are opting for cremation and lowest-cost coffins and funerals. But none so fun to read as WAPO Dana Milbank's "Funeral Business Feeling Six Feet Under."
A few excerpts:
In case you've been dying for more bad news about the economy, here's a grave new indicator: Even the death industry is in a hole.
It was quite an undertaking, and it didn't work; apparently, funding funerals wasn't regarded as a spur to economic growth, because much of the benefit gets deep-sixed.
And it's not just the corpses that have to make do with less.
A few excerpts:
In case you've been dying for more bad news about the economy, here's a grave new indicator: Even the death industry is in a hole.
It was quite an undertaking, and it didn't work; apparently, funding funerals wasn't regarded as a spur to economic growth, because much of the benefit gets deep-sixed.
And it's not just the corpses that have to make do with less.
Thursday, April 2, 2009
Real Justice
In 2000, U.S. District Court Judge Manuel Real was given control over about $34 million in assets seized from Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos. Last year, the U.S. Supreme Court ordered him to remit the trust funds to an institutional trustee for safekeeping while ownership issues were resolved. The 85-year-old judge has not complied and has provided only a minimal accounting, a half-page statement that does not reveal whether or how much interest the funds have earned over nearly a decade. He mentions a $63,000 payment for trustee fees and $5 million in what he calls "other disbursements." It alludes to $98 million in purchases and $118 million in sales suggesting a gain of $20 million.
He has a history of controversy and has been reprimanded by the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals for misconduct and just last year was booted from three cases in four months for allegedly ignoring evidence and a host of other reasons, according to the WSJ.
Attorneys for the claimants have appealed to the 9th Circuit for a detailed accounting of the assets which could be worth as much as $50 million dollars.
First to Fall - UBS Client Edition
An accountant from Boca Raton has been arrested and charged with filing a false tax return. His is the first arrest of a major American client of UBS, which is accused of helping Americans evade taxes. UBS has admitted to conspiracy to defraud the US.
Risk of Audit
According to the Wall St. Journal, you are more likely to run into the taxman if -
- you make a lot of money.
- take the full mortgage-interest deduction on a refinanced mortgage where you've borrowed to take equity out. This is particularly true in higher-priced housing markets.
- have a major change in income - even if it's a decline.
- big business expenses
- numerous gifts to charity
- reported income that doesn't match numbers on 1099 and W-2 forms
- file Schedule C, profit and loss for business
- big write-offs for hobbies.
Estate Planning Fraud Alert
$16 M default judgment entered against seller of living trust
By Michelle Massey, Texarkana Bureau
Southeast Texas Record
4/1/2009 7:25 PM
U.S. District Judge Harry F. Barnes granted plaintiffs a default judgment for more than $16 million against The Estate Plan, a company accused of ripping off senior citizens in Texas and Arkansas.
The Estate Plan and other living trust sellers are facing allegations of "masquerading as qualified financial advisers, estate planners, lawyers, and paralegals" to "exploit and prey" upon senior citizens with the creation and selling of "unnecessary and often useless" living trusts.
The suit claims companies intentionally misstate the law, and use fear of the estate tax to get senior citizens to buy "plans," that are often ineffective and unnecessary.
Once the plans are purchased these operators convince senior citizens to use their IRA accounts or other tax-exempt accounts to purchase variable annuities without disclosing the risks, fees, surrender charges, or commissions.
Defendants are accused of fraud, unauthorized practice of law, negligence, breach of fiduciary duty and conspiracy.
Defendants named in the lawsuit are John R. Vermillion, John Vermillion and Associates LLC, CLA USA Inc., CLA USA Insurance Services, CLA Marketing, CLA Estate Services, CLA Insurance Services, Charles Loper Jr., Charles Loper III, Steven Morgan, Robert Reese and The Estate Plan Inc.
The plaintiffs filed an amended complaint on Sept. 11 adding defendants Winning Strategies Marketing, Inc., Quest Staffing Group Inc., James E Bradshaw Jr, Joel Carson and Olaf Turek.
Correction: U.S. District Judge Harry F. Barnes granted plaintiffs a default judgment for more than $16 million against The Estate Plan after failing to answer the complaint. The Estate Plan has been severed from the suit. Charges are still pending against the others and all are maintaining their innocence. The commenter below is correct.
By Michelle Massey, Texarkana Bureau
Southeast Texas Record
4/1/2009 7:25 PM
U.S. District Judge Harry F. Barnes granted plaintiffs a default judgment for more than $16 million against The Estate Plan, a company accused of ripping off senior citizens in Texas and Arkansas.
The Estate Plan and other living trust sellers are facing allegations of "masquerading as qualified financial advisers, estate planners, lawyers, and paralegals" to "exploit and prey" upon senior citizens with the creation and selling of "unnecessary and often useless" living trusts.
The suit claims companies intentionally misstate the law, and use fear of the estate tax to get senior citizens to buy "plans," that are often ineffective and unnecessary.
Once the plans are purchased these operators convince senior citizens to use their IRA accounts or other tax-exempt accounts to purchase variable annuities without disclosing the risks, fees, surrender charges, or commissions.
Defendants are accused of fraud, unauthorized practice of law, negligence, breach of fiduciary duty and conspiracy.
Defendants named in the lawsuit are John R. Vermillion, John Vermillion and Associates LLC, CLA USA Inc., CLA USA Insurance Services, CLA Marketing, CLA Estate Services, CLA Insurance Services, Charles Loper Jr., Charles Loper III, Steven Morgan, Robert Reese and The Estate Plan Inc.
The plaintiffs filed an amended complaint on Sept. 11 adding defendants Winning Strategies Marketing, Inc., Quest Staffing Group Inc., James E Bradshaw Jr, Joel Carson and Olaf Turek.
Correction: U.S. District Judge Harry F. Barnes granted plaintiffs a default judgment for more than $16 million against The Estate Plan after failing to answer the complaint. The Estate Plan has been severed from the suit. Charges are still pending against the others and all are maintaining their innocence. The commenter below is correct.
Literary life after death
By Rachel Keeler
Published: March 26 2009 12:59 Last updated: March 26 2009 12:59
For lovers and scholars of the 20th-century novel, Stephen Joyce has become something of a literary villain. The grandson and sole living heir of James Joyce, the Irish author and poet, has spent the past 17 years fiercely guarding his family’s estate through a series of court battles with those brave enough to try to use copyrighted Joyce documents.
In 1988, he took offense at the epilogue to Brenda Maddox’s “Nora,” a biography of Joyce’s wife, which described the decades that Joyce’s schizophrenic daughter, Lucia, spent in a mental asylum. Although the book had already been printed in galleys, Maddox, fearing a legal battle, offered to delete the section; the agreement she signed with Stephen also enjoined her descendants from publishing the material. Shortly afterward, at a Bloomsday symposium in Venice, Stephen announced that he had destroyed all the letters that his aunt Lucia had written to him and his wife. He added that he had done the same with postcards and a telegram sent to Lucia by Samuel Beckett, with whom she had pursued a relationship in the late nineteen-twenties.
“I have not destroyed any papers or letters in my grandfather’s hand, yet,” Stephen wrote at the time. But in the early nineties he persuaded the National Library of Ireland to give him some Joyce family correspondence that was scheduled to be unsealed. Scholars worry that these documents, too, have been destroyed. He has blocked or discouraged countless public readings of “Ulysses,” and once tried unsuccessfully to halt a Web audiocast of the book. In 1997, he sued the Irish scholar Danis Rose, who was trying to publish a newly edited version of “Ulysses,” calling it “one of the literary hoaxes of the century.” (Around the same time, Stephen expressed his intention to obstruct a proposed new edition by the American scholar John Kidd; he told the chairman of Kidd’s publisher, W. W. Norton, that he was “implacably opposed” to the project, which was never completed.) According to Hans E. Jahnke, Stephen’s stepbrother, who once had a stake in the Joyce estate, the suit against Rose, which lasted five years, cost the estate roughly a hundred thousand dollars. The estate won the case. In 2004, the centenary of Bloomsday, Stephen threatened the Irish government with a lawsuit if it staged any Bloomsday readings; the readings were cancelled. He warned the National Library of Ireland that a planned display of his grandfather’s manuscripts violated his copyright. (The Irish Senate passed an emergency amendment to thwart him.) His antagonism led the Abbey Theatre to cancel a production of Joyce’s play “Exiles,” and he told Adam Harvey, a performance artist who had simply memorized a portion of “Finnegans Wake” in expectation of reciting it onstage, that he had likely “already infringed” on the estate’s copyright. Harvey later discovered that, under British law, Joyce did not have the right to stop his performance. Stephen has also attempted to impede the publication of dozens of scholarly works on James Joyce. He rejects nearly every request to quote from unpublished letters. Last year, he told a prominent Joyce scholar that he was no longer granting permissions to quote from any of Joyce’s writings. (The scholar, fearing retribution, declined to be named in this article.) Stephen’s primary motive has been to put a halt to work that, in his view, either violates his family’s privacy or exceeds the bounds of reputable scholarship. The two-decade-long effort has also been an exercise in power—an attempt to establish his own centrality in regard to anything involving his grandfather. If you want to write about James Joyce and plan to quote more than a few short passages, you need Stephen’s consent. He has said, “We have proven that we are willing to take any necessary action to back and enforce what we legitimately believe in.” Or, as he put it to me during two phone calls that he recently made to me from La Flotte, “What other literary estate stands up the way I do? It’s a whole way of looking at things and looking at life.”
Stephen’s notoriously acerbic dealings are held up by many who question the role of intellectual property law in literary estate management.
For many it's not about money, but about legacy.
Felicity Dahl look after the estate of her late husband, author Roald Dahl.
has established a children’s museum and charitable foundation, presided over several fantastical movie adaptations, set up an award-winning website and is now promoting the new Roald Dahl Funny Prize, awarded in November in London to authors Ursula Jones and Andy Stanton.
While the extended Dahl family shares ownership of the estate and its copyright royalties – 10 per cent of which helps fund the museum and foundation – Dahl explicitly left control of his legacy to Felicity. She now oversees an ebullient team of literary agents, trustees and executors who direct exactly how Dahl’s copyrighted stories, archives and trademarked brand name may be used.
There are big variations in how way estates are handled by heirs. JRR Tolkien sold the film rights to his books in 1969. His family is now embroiled in a lawsuit against New Line Cinema over royalties from the recent Lord of the Rings films. Some authors donate full rights to charities while others leave few instructions to heirs who let the writing slip into obscurity.
But for people such as Felicity Dahl, who see decades of potential wrapped up in art left behind, the proper care and development of a loved one’s intellectual property is everything.
Maintaining artistic integrity in posthumous projects takes a tremendous amount of acumen and finesse on the part of an heir. Getting it right also requires the ability to exploit disjointed levels of international copyright and trademark laws.
Roald Dahl’s archives are open to the public at the Roald Dahl Museum in Buckinghamshire, just outside London.
By Rachel Keeler
Published: March 26 2009 12:59 Last updated: March 26 2009 12:59
For lovers and scholars of the 20th-century novel, Stephen Joyce has become something of a literary villain. The grandson and sole living heir of James Joyce, the Irish author and poet, has spent the past 17 years fiercely guarding his family’s estate through a series of court battles with those brave enough to try to use copyrighted Joyce documents.
In 1988, he took offense at the epilogue to Brenda Maddox’s “Nora,” a biography of Joyce’s wife, which described the decades that Joyce’s schizophrenic daughter, Lucia, spent in a mental asylum. Although the book had already been printed in galleys, Maddox, fearing a legal battle, offered to delete the section; the agreement she signed with Stephen also enjoined her descendants from publishing the material. Shortly afterward, at a Bloomsday symposium in Venice, Stephen announced that he had destroyed all the letters that his aunt Lucia had written to him and his wife. He added that he had done the same with postcards and a telegram sent to Lucia by Samuel Beckett, with whom she had pursued a relationship in the late nineteen-twenties.
“I have not destroyed any papers or letters in my grandfather’s hand, yet,” Stephen wrote at the time. But in the early nineties he persuaded the National Library of Ireland to give him some Joyce family correspondence that was scheduled to be unsealed. Scholars worry that these documents, too, have been destroyed. He has blocked or discouraged countless public readings of “Ulysses,” and once tried unsuccessfully to halt a Web audiocast of the book. In 1997, he sued the Irish scholar Danis Rose, who was trying to publish a newly edited version of “Ulysses,” calling it “one of the literary hoaxes of the century.” (Around the same time, Stephen expressed his intention to obstruct a proposed new edition by the American scholar John Kidd; he told the chairman of Kidd’s publisher, W. W. Norton, that he was “implacably opposed” to the project, which was never completed.) According to Hans E. Jahnke, Stephen’s stepbrother, who once had a stake in the Joyce estate, the suit against Rose, which lasted five years, cost the estate roughly a hundred thousand dollars. The estate won the case. In 2004, the centenary of Bloomsday, Stephen threatened the Irish government with a lawsuit if it staged any Bloomsday readings; the readings were cancelled. He warned the National Library of Ireland that a planned display of his grandfather’s manuscripts violated his copyright. (The Irish Senate passed an emergency amendment to thwart him.) His antagonism led the Abbey Theatre to cancel a production of Joyce’s play “Exiles,” and he told Adam Harvey, a performance artist who had simply memorized a portion of “Finnegans Wake” in expectation of reciting it onstage, that he had likely “already infringed” on the estate’s copyright. Harvey later discovered that, under British law, Joyce did not have the right to stop his performance. Stephen has also attempted to impede the publication of dozens of scholarly works on James Joyce. He rejects nearly every request to quote from unpublished letters. Last year, he told a prominent Joyce scholar that he was no longer granting permissions to quote from any of Joyce’s writings. (The scholar, fearing retribution, declined to be named in this article.) Stephen’s primary motive has been to put a halt to work that, in his view, either violates his family’s privacy or exceeds the bounds of reputable scholarship. The two-decade-long effort has also been an exercise in power—an attempt to establish his own centrality in regard to anything involving his grandfather. If you want to write about James Joyce and plan to quote more than a few short passages, you need Stephen’s consent. He has said, “We have proven that we are willing to take any necessary action to back and enforce what we legitimately believe in.” Or, as he put it to me during two phone calls that he recently made to me from La Flotte, “What other literary estate stands up the way I do? It’s a whole way of looking at things and looking at life.”
Stephen’s notoriously acerbic dealings are held up by many who question the role of intellectual property law in literary estate management.
For many it's not about money, but about legacy.
Felicity Dahl look after the estate of her late husband, author Roald Dahl.
has established a children’s museum and charitable foundation, presided over several fantastical movie adaptations, set up an award-winning website and is now promoting the new Roald Dahl Funny Prize, awarded in November in London to authors Ursula Jones and Andy Stanton.
While the extended Dahl family shares ownership of the estate and its copyright royalties – 10 per cent of which helps fund the museum and foundation – Dahl explicitly left control of his legacy to Felicity. She now oversees an ebullient team of literary agents, trustees and executors who direct exactly how Dahl’s copyrighted stories, archives and trademarked brand name may be used.
There are big variations in how way estates are handled by heirs. JRR Tolkien sold the film rights to his books in 1969. His family is now embroiled in a lawsuit against New Line Cinema over royalties from the recent Lord of the Rings films. Some authors donate full rights to charities while others leave few instructions to heirs who let the writing slip into obscurity.
But for people such as Felicity Dahl, who see decades of potential wrapped up in art left behind, the proper care and development of a loved one’s intellectual property is everything.
Maintaining artistic integrity in posthumous projects takes a tremendous amount of acumen and finesse on the part of an heir. Getting it right also requires the ability to exploit disjointed levels of international copyright and trademark laws.
Roald Dahl’s archives are open to the public at the Roald Dahl Museum in Buckinghamshire, just outside London.
Wednesday, April 1, 2009
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