Donald W. Flaig on estate planning, corporate law, and why people put both off. Recorded for American Lawyers Television.
Donald Flaig, the founder and principal of The Flaig Law Firm, has been an attorney since 1997. He practises estate planning and corporate law, has been selected as a Super Lawyer year after year, and was nominated and selected as a Top 100 attorney with The National Advocates.
When I was in second grade I knew I wanted to be an attorney. My dad was an attorney, and I think it was his passion for the law that really turned me on to wanting to become an attorney. That same passion has been part of my practice as well.
It is an area of law that everybody needs. When people come in and we go through the process, by the time they walk out the door they have got something they need: they are building a legacy for their family. We are able to stop them going through some of the nightmares of probate, and really care for their family. That can be the living trust, which passes wealth from one generation to the next, and also what we call the ancillary documents: your powers of attorney for assets, for health care, who is going to make health care decisions for you if you cannot make them for yourself, and guardianship, who is going to care for your children. These are things a lot of people put off, but we love doing it, because we are able to handle their affairs now so they are ready for the future.
We find a few things happen. One is that people simply delay. It is not the most enjoyable thing to think about and talk about: death, and what is going to happen later, and where is my stuff going to go. So people procrastinate, and death can happen before the documents are drafted. The second is incapacity. Now we have people who wish they had done everything, but they are mentally unable to handle it, and the documents cannot be drafted for them. The best thing is to say, I know this is something we need to get done, let us go and see the appropriate attorney and get those documents drafted now, while we have our mind right and can plan for the future today.
There are a couple of things we do. One is what we call your annual maintenance for a corporation: dealing with the Secretary of State, and the drafting and the filing that needs to be done every year. We also deal with day to day operations. Clients come in and say, we have this contract because we are joining with somebody else, and we want you to review it. One of the big problems we find is that people use old contracts that are ambiguous. We will go in and touch them up, and sometimes we will draft the contracts ourselves, to make sure we are bringing value to their business so they can handle their day to day operations successfully.
That is the great thing about modern technology. We have clients all over California, on the estate planning side as well as the corporate and business side. Because of the internet, and the way we can transfer information and teleconference, we can in essence be in front of our client without being in front of them. Location has never been an issue for the Flaig Law Firm. We handle people who are five, six, seven hours away, and yet it feels as if they are in our office. Providing that value, for clients who are far away and for the ones who are close, is as if they have in-house counsel without the in-house counsel cost.
Either a phone call or an email works. We get phone calls every day and we get emails every day. One thing we pride ourselves on is getting back to clients right away. We want to make sure we are taking care of clients and handling them right where they are at.
This is an edited transcript of the interview above. The speakers are named, the punctuation is ours and the questions are shortened; the answers are Donald’s own words. Watch the full interview on YouTube →
