Personalized Solutions to Protect Your Family's Assets, with Ryan Darling

0:01 [snorts] There's so many options for estate planning and related services these days. You can get one for free on ChatGPT. The problem is you don't get what you pay for. I'm really lucky to have today a law firm that's been in business here in California for I think 50 years or over 50 years and currently does the last time I spoke to him about 300 or 350 estate plans a year annually currently. Looks like I'd have today I guess not the founder of your father but

0:31 That'd be my father, yeah. the operator, the what's your title? President of Darling Law, Ryan Darling. Ryan, thanks for joining us again.

0:40 Thank you for having me. So I had the numbers right? Your father started the firm about 50 years ago? that's correct. He started it here in Riverside. He had a couple of other law firms and decided to branch out on his own and just decided to dive strictly into estate planning on probably 30, 40 years ago.

0:58 You know, my father was attorney in initially Beverly Hills and moved to Whittier and practiced there 62 years ago and well he didn't do estate planning. He had a partner who did wills and trusts in those days and then it moved into estate planning over time. So I've seen that business change over time. When it started, you know, I know in their case you they would do a will and seem like the attorneys were responsible keeping the original at least most of the time. And I remember my dad's office they had this like a vault like a bank vault. They kept all the It was fireproof and whatever theft proof. so I guess that's where your father must have started back in that era. It's changed a lot in the last few years, hasn't it?

1:35 Oh absolutely. You know, wills were the way we used to do things and now we always recommend somebody do a revocable trust.

1:43 And so one of the challenges I think has to be that same thing in my business that you know, if you don't define your value, the market will define it for you and that's why we do this podcast to educate that there are differences in types of probates I'm sorry in estate plans. And there are differences in attorneys and the from offerings. One can get one for free online. There's all kinds of very inexpensive ones. And there's videos that tell people do all kinds of things. For example, suggesting why you're better off having an irrevocable trust than a revocable, which is probably true in some cases, but probably not true for most people. Talk a little bit about the basic kind of trust that people get set up in your practice most of the time.

2:22 Most of the time, probably 99.9% of the time, we're going to set up what's called a revocable living trust. Yeah, there are irrevocable trusts that you could set up. I know that's the popular thing on Tik Tok and Instagram and YouTube and acts, but

2:38 Those are my sources for good legal information. That's right, [unclear]. You get real expertise. Right. Yeah. And heart surgery, too. Right. On Tik Tok. you know, those videos, they sell you on all of the pros associated with having an irrevocable trust, but they usually don't take the time to explain to you the cons of an irrevocable trust or the difference between revocable and irrevocable. You know, for the most part, for somebody who's trying to plan their estate to decide who gets what when they pass away and who's in charge, we're going to set up a revocable living trust for that type of person.

3:10 Now, I know that talking to you before and having you on my other podcast, Probate Weekly, that you talk about you try to practice happy law. Right. And I just got I just finished an episode with a trust litigator. That's not happy law, actually speaking. So, maybe it's happy with his client happy at the end, but it's a battle along the way. But really, I think good estate planning is probably avoiding litigation where possible. Talk a bit about your focus and how that focus is on happy law.

3:36 [snorts] You know, it's difficult when people come in, they have these grand ideas on how they want things to be distributed. That is the great thing about a trust is that we can put different provisions in a trust and delay the distribution over period of time. For instance, I have a 15-year-old son. My trust is set up so that it'll pay for his needs up until the age of 25, at which point he's going to get a third at 25, a third at 30, and a third at 35. And I'm going to have a trustee who's going to oversee that for him, and that money's going to be used to pay for his needs. And you know, there's a big difference between needs and wants. I need money to go to college is a lot different than, you know, I want to take a gap year and go backpack around Europe for a whole year and have the trust pay for it. but a lot of people get these grand ideas where they want to put all these restrictions in the trust, and they want to control the trust, and you know, sometimes that makes sense for some children, but you have to realize that somebody has to implement that, and somebody has to be the trustee or the gatekeeper. And if you got two kids that already don't like each other, you know, and now we put in these restrictions on a child, and his brother is the trustee, what do you think's going to happen to that relationship? They're just going to start fighting, and they're just going to start arguing. Often times people will say, "Well, I have four kids, and I want them to get the house, but I don't want the house to be sold." Well, how do we do that, right? How do we handle four different people 10, 15 years from now who have families of their own, and they all want the house? and so, often times I try to help families come to a solution where the end result isn't the family members ending up in court because they can't come to an agreement about who gets what, or somebody's not being fair, or somebody's not being transparent. [snorts] I don't think a lot of estate planning attorneys think well down the road, cuz that's usually where some of those types of trusts end up is they end up in court, they end up in litigation, and that's when things get really costly.

5:36 You know, I often think now I love my brother. With this day, we get along really well. My wife is always impressed at how close we are, but we also fought like dogs. I mean, we killed each other. And you know, if mom had a piece of cake and cut it in half, we'd kill each other for the larger piece. We'd get a microscope out and measure it. Imagine fighting over the assets. I see customers and clients, you know, in that case, fighting over assets, and they're just reliving that fight from when they were 12 years old over who got the bigger hot dog or who got the bigger piece of cake at the end.

6:04 Right. You know, it's you know, people my you know, every family's dysfunctional. Let's just be honest. we all have Hey. Hey. We all are, right? So, you know, you raise your kids the same way, you feed them the same thing, you give them equal number of gifts for Christmas, and you have the same rules for them, and they grow up, and they're all completely different usually. and it's not that you were a bad parent or you're a good parent. That's just how kids end up sometimes. And so, from an estate planning standpoint, we have to take all of that in consideration and ensure that, yeah, once you are gone, your kids aren't continuing to hate one another or fight over the simplest things because from what I've experienced is that money will tear families apart.

6:43 Yeah. And so, as an estate planner, we're trying to prevent those types of things from happening. So, it seems to me the most common area of fighting and battling in estates is over or as result of insufficient thought given to who the trustee of the estate or the successor trustee of the estate is, right? When you put a plan together, you try to anticipate, well, who's going to be around after I'm gone? And, you know, you can guess, but you don't necessarily know. And I know that best practices have several. but often times I look at that I see a trust where it says, you know, both of the siblings are the successor trustee. I'm thinking, "this is not going to go well to try to sell a property." So, talk about what you see as most common mistakes or what your most common recommendations are in trying to avoid litigation specifically regarding successor trustee issues.

7:31 You know, often times people will say, "Well, hey, I want this child to be the trustee because they're the oldest." that is not the mindset that I have. You know, this isn't the 1200s. It's not a birthright. Just because you're the oldest, you shouldn't necessarily be the trustee. It is a It is a difficult job to be the trustee. And I wouldn't say difficult that it's hard, but it is very time-consuming. you know, I had a family member pass away couple years ago and I was the trustee of her trust. And it's a lot of work. You know, you got to go to the different banks, you've got to contact financial institutions, you've got to clean up the house. And oftentimes people don't think about that. And you know, you can't appoint somebody who lives back east sometimes when we have somebody who here lives here locally from a logistics standpoint would make more sense. But oftentimes people will say I want this child to be in charge. And I'll ask them, well, do you think that emotionally that they can handle this? you know, some people have a hard time coming to terms with the fact that they have to sell their childhood home. And they become paralyzed by grief. And then 6 months turns into a year and nothing's happened. And the other family members start to get upset or you know, when are we going to get our inheritance? Why aren't you doing things? so there's a lot to factor in when we decide on a trustee. Now, I like the idea of co-trustees sometimes because it creates a checks and balances system.

8:53 But you have to make sure that those two people get along. and your trust has to be buttoned up so there's really nothing for them to argue about. When trusts aren't drafted properly or they're not properly funded is when we can start to see those co-trustees start to fight about things.

9:09 What are the things that are often drafted improperly that you see leads to litigation or fights? [sighs and gasps] I would say that the number one is probably a trust that's not being properly funded. you know, somebody who sets up a trust and they try to save a couple hundred bucks so they go to somebody down the street who's not a licensed attorney who doesn't actually prepare a deed to move the property into the trust for them and they just tell the layperson, "Hey, just do this deed." Well, the lay person doesn't know how to do a deed or doesn't properly fund the accounts and move those into the trust. So, that's that's a big one, I think. Often times people will refi a house and when they refi the property, the lender makes them take it out of the trust, but the lender doesn't help them move it back into the trust and then they pass away and then that property ends up in probate. To me, those are the big ones.

10:04 Let's let's stop there cuz that's one that affects us as realtors the most. I'm not to stop the conversation, but just to take a break there. The most common thing we see is the deed of the property not in the trust and not finding. And so, one thing you said was not preparing the deed. You know, I'm sure like any realtor who's been in this business a while, I've seen really nicely prepared deeds that attorneys prepared and gave the customer with a really nice instruction sheet. You need to get this notarized. You need to get to the county and get it recorded. And you know, there's different levels of service. I know some attorneys certainly online services are, you know, at best, here's the deed. That's that's a level. And the next level would be, here's the deed and get it notarized. Now, please take it and get it recorded. I know there's some attorneys that'll take the step and actually get it recorded or follow up on it and maybe charge for those additional steps. Where do What's your service offering to customers on estate planning when it's real estate? Do you prepare the deeds and do you manage the transfer of the title and the

11:01 Yeah, we do we do it all. So, we prepare the quitclaim deed. We record it for you with recorder's office. It then gets sent back to me to make sure that it was properly That way I make sure it was properly recorded and then I mail it to the client. And then when I do that, I also take care of all the PCOR forms or the preliminary change of ownership forms so that the property taxes don't get reassessed. You know, a lot of times the an attorney will say, "Here, record this deed." But then doesn't give instructions to the client that, "Hey, you also need to file these PCORs so that the property that you bought 30 or 40 years ago, the property taxes don't get reassessed at current market value. So we take care of all of that for our clients. I don't care if you have property up in Northern California, Southern California, even other states, we're going to take care of that for you.

11:47 I think it's the most important distinction and I knew the answer because we've talked about this before and but it's the most important distinction to me because I just feel like the attorneys who don't do that, you're just getting a fee for service, you're not solving the customer's problem. If they walk out of your door at the end of the process and the is that getting some of my safe deposit box and the gold's not put in the safe, it's sitting on top of the safe, you really haven't helped the customer. If the bar association asked me, I think that should be grounds for I don't know, disbarment or some sort of actions or signing or something because that's what the customer thinks happened, they don't know. And they walk out, you know, as a result of the I've had them walk out with a book so proud of it. They thought it'll get done. They paid 3,000, 5,000 dollars and really I won't say they've done nothing but they haven't done a lot. They haven't moved forward the football much. Of course there's a legal issue if they have the plan, is that really what they want or not? I want to get into that but I'm just saying it's still going to go to probate. There's no way Now that's what you wanted to avoid in the first place. So I'm glad that you do that. I think for anybody listening, I saw a statistic for the online services that do these very inexpensive plans. I believe the answer is 90% don't get executed and have the real estate transferred into the estate. And to me that is just I want to say criminal because it's not criminal but it just it but it but it just blows my blood and as I'm on a mission to make sure we get this done.

13:15 We should be checking the public records, we should we know the answer. Was it done or not? And we got to get involved in this process and do a better job I think. Yeah, you know, a lot of a lot of attorneys sell like these do-it-yourself trusts like a cardboard box that you have to put together. And you know, the layperson doesn't know there's a difference on a legal description between the lot number and the tract number versus just thinking, oh, I just need to write the address of the property down, or I need to put in the APN number, right? And so, we've always recorded deeds for our clients so that they don't have to worry about whether or not it was it was properly funded. I can't tell you how many Heggstad petitions I have to do from somebody who had a trust prepared by another attorney and they never moved the property into the trust. And when they the kids hired the realtor, you know, they go into escrow and the whole time they thought the property was vested in the trust name. And when they pulled title, they realized, oh, nope, it's not. And you know, they call me up and then we've got to go into court and that's not a hearing that just takes place in the following week.

14:17 Right. that's a hearing that's going to take place maybe two or three months later and then it just puts the escrow on hold. And so, you know, had the individual had an attorney who properly funded their trust for them, it would save the kids so much more money in the long run.

14:33 As real estate attorneys, I use different online tools and the tools we typically use for public record information won't catch that deed out. So, it will say property owned by the trust and there's a quitclaim deed that it treats as extraneous. But it's all the difference in the world if they deeded it out for refinance, it's insured title.

14:50 Right. It's better Right. when it's in the trust. And so, and I often times people say to me, oh, it's no big deal, it's just a Heggstad petition. In LA County today, you file a petition, an 850 petition for putting a deed getting property back into a trust that should be perhaps, assuming you win, assuming there's no contesting, assuming there's no problems, your hearing date is not for 6 months in LA. Now, you Ryan is primarily out in Riverside?

15:17 In Riverside, yeah. Yeah. So, okay, it's only 2 months, but in LA County, you're not going to see anybody for 6 months. And I don't I don't believe you can get them expedited or ex parte because your real estate sale's falling apart.

15:29 Yeah, and I not usually because the probate code dictates 30 days notice, right? And then who knows maybe somebody shows up and wants to object and then now that hearing gets continued. You know, I had a hearing in LA County couple months ago where we had waited months to finally get an estate closed and the day of the hearing we all appear remotely and the clerk says, "Yeah, we don't have a judge today." So, we're going to have to continue this out another 2 months and the family was furious, but that's what happens in probate.

15:57 Yeah. We had a case 2 weeks ago. We had a protest or whatever they want to call some political rally or thing and the court downtown was closed for a day on a work day. The whole series So, that wasn't seen when the Dodgers won the World Series. I'm glad they did, but the next day they had a parade. The parade shut down the court. If your hearing was that day in court, even though they could do remote, they if they can't take in walk-ins, they can't do it. All these things get delayed with 30 days. I mean, I will say the judges manage those delays better than they do the

16:27 Right. Right. They all They all want the Dodgers out of the parade. It's ridiculous. Right, we all do. [laughter] Well, I don't know. There's some I'm sure there's some people in New York or San Francisco, but whatever. But anyhow, yeah, you don't want to have to go to get a Heggstad petition especially if you're paying $3,000, $5,000 or more for a complicated estate plan and not get the job done. To me, it just seems like such a problem. So, one of the challenges that I know that you have also just the nature of your business like mine is kind of getting customers to take action. Meaning, I know plenty of people who you know, they realize they need to get this done. They think it through. They make some notes, do some research, they call you up, they come and see you. You give them thoughtful advice. You prepare a draft, they review it. You prepare the final draft and they just don't get around to actually executing it. You know, on one hand I'm sure you know, you want them to get the job done. So, either you know, you or your staff members calling them to remind them or emailing or whatever. On the other hand, they're busy, life is life-ing. there's a fine line between being too salesy and not servicing your customer. How do you draw that line?

17:30 You know, if you if I have somebody who's come in to see me and you know, they paid me to prepare the documents and they haven't signed them yet, my staff is going to be following up with them on a routine basis. We're going to be calling, we're going to be sending out letters. you know, often times people can't get here between 9:00 and 5:00, so maybe we'll set up a signing for later in the evening or maybe we'll do a weekend signing to help that for some people out. you know, nobody likes to think about this. Everyone thinks that hey, I'll get to this sooner or later. I'm going to live forever. a lot of people think it's a difficult process. most of my clients when they're done, they say, "Man, this is really simple. [snorts] Had I known it was this easy, I would have done it a long time ago." you know, you everybody's different.

18:15 Put those dancing people on put them on your website because [laughter] Right. Right. there's not enough of those. Right. It's it really is a simple process. Now, there are a lot of attorneys

18:24 [snorts] who will turn this into a difficult process and they overwhelm the client with too much information at once and then now they're left trying to remember what the attorney was talking about and they get confused by things. I have learned that that is not the way to practice law. I don't use big words. I just that's not the way that I speak. there are a lot of attorneys that that approach it that way and that's that's great for them, but in my experience, we're all just average Joes just trying to do our best and we just we just try to make things simple.

18:56 Yeah. Yeah. Question, you know, when you have the occasional client who gets to the end in the last stage is the execution of the of the agreement, maybe also some documents to transfer property and they don't come in. And I'm sure you've had some people in those cases who pass. And I have I have a large estate, $40 million estate. You know, nobody really knows. Did he not execute it cuz he just wasn't really ready to make those decisions

19:24 Right. and put them into codify them? Or was it just merely he was busy or whatever, negligent, and then let it go? What are your thoughts on that? What time What percent of time do you think it's just they're busy and don't get around to it versus they said, "Well, you know, we made this change. We did this. We wrote out this person or gave them more or gave them less. I'm not really sure I'm ready to do it yet." And they don't tell you that necessarily, but you know that's got to be part of the underlying hesitation, right?

19:49 Yeah, you know, I've I've had a few clients come in where we've met with them, we sent them their drafts, and they passed away before they could come in and sign their paperwork, and then now the kids are calling me saying, "What do we do?" And unfortunately, we have to probate the estate at that time.

20:03 Right. maybe the drafts we're going to give the distribution 40 20 to the three kids. Well, because they don't sign it, now it goes a third a third a third. and who knows? I mean, maybe they started to feel guilty or maybe one of the kids got in their ears saying what this isn't right or you should do this. you know, there is a lot more litigation going on these days for that financial elder abuse in relation to execution of trusts. it's mind-blowing to me how many times I get my staff gets phone calls a day from somebody calling and saying, "Oh, hey, my parents are clients of yours. They want to make a change to their trust." And it's, you know, okay, [snorts] well, why are you calling us? Oh, they told me to call. Oh, okay. what changes do they want to make? Oh, they want to give me the house. Okay, well, we're going to need to meet with Mom and Dad alone. Well, why can't I can't Why can't I meet with the attorney? Well, that's [snorts] not how this works. And then they get upset. so, I think there's a lot more of that going on these days of that undue influence trying to persuade parents on how things should be distributed.

21:11 I know you I think you told me you do about 350 trusts a year. Correct. I mean do you handle that or do you open 350 new ones? 350 new ones a year. I usually have I usually have eight to 10 new trusts a week. Yeah.

21:25 So you're not hearing a lot of excuses. You got a lot of people signing papers around you. But I'm sure you must have like everybody you must have your best friend who just won't get it done or put So what's the most common excuse that people have that you really you know can't help them. You can't get them over that hump.

21:43 They just I've never really understood it. You know, if I pay a contractor money to do a job, I don't just say, well, you can just do it whenever you want or whenever you get to it. you know, we've got some people who probably came in and saw my dad 10, 15 years ago and they just never got around to coming in and signing it [snorts] regardless of the amount of letters we send them or the times we talk to them on the phone. The staff will call them and they'll say, yeah, I know I need to get in there. again, I just think it's the mindset of it's not that big of a deal. I'm going to live forever. I'll get to it when I get to it. that's not my mindset in life. If I pay for something, I want something. but there's there's a finality of it, too. You know, I've had quite a few clients who come in and they'll sign their paperwork and they get very emotional. And I think they look at it as, well, if I sign this, then I'm recognizing the fact that I'm going to die one day. and that's difficult for people, but you know, in reality, we're all going to pass away. So we really aren't doing this estate planning for ourselves. I think we should approach it from we're doing this to make our kids' lives easier.

22:51 I probably more involved in probate than estate planning cuz good estate planning eliminates the need for complicated real estate agents like me. So yet I would love to help you know, that happen more often. one of the things that strikes me as funny is how many times I'm involved with a probate litigation we sell property and not sell but property is awarded to one of the parties, couple million dollars, and I'll say to that person, you know, you can see that if you mom or dad had a trust instead of this litigation and you know, if they wanted to give you the property they just would have given it to you and would have avoided all this. you know, I'm not attorney recommending something. I recommend you sit with attorney to evaluate. And they never take supposed to make And they're in the courtroom and they saw and they know the bills and maybe they even paid them or approved them, the bills for the attorneys litigation, the fees, the filing fees. What is with that one?

23:42 You know, I don't know. I probably have 40 to 50 probates going at all times. And so I'm dealing with possibly, I don't know, maybe 100 to 150 heirs if you think each decedent had two to three kids. And from those potential heirs, which I look at as potential clients, maybe one will come in and see me and it makes no sense to me. but again, they're younger. They're in their maybe 20s, 30s, or 40s and they think, well, I just received this money. I'm going to live a long time. I'll take care of getting a trust drawn up in the future. you know, most of our business comes from clients who had trusts with us. And when they passed away, the kids see how smooth it was from mom and dad having a trust and then they come in and see us and get a trust done. it's really shocking cuz probate is no fun. It takes a year. There's all kinds of fees associated with it. You would think that had you gone through this horrible experience, you would do whatever you can to prevent that from happening to your kids. But people don't do it and I just don't understand it.

24:47 I will say probate is fun for me as a real estate agent but I'm getting paid. I wouldn't do it for free. It's not that fun. [laughter] Right. Yeah, I mean I do probate. I like to say that I don't like doing probate cuz it can be a pain sometimes, but I don't mind doing probate because the stat fees that attorneys and administrators get is pretty large.

25:08 I also feel like you're kind of working in like a reality TV show set. Like you see stuff going on. This is very interesting. Oh, the store I mean I think we've talked about this before. You know, I feel like I could write a book for some of the crazy things that I It's unreal.

25:24 Anyone watching this, if you think he should write a book with the best stories about probate or maybe I should collaborate one and write it to attorneys like Ryan who have some great stories and create a book on you wouldn't believe this happened in my probate. I think that'd be a great book. I need to I need to think about that.

25:38 It's so salacious. It's right out of like Jerry Springer sometimes or daytime drama. It's It's crazy. You know, once I bumped into Jerry Springer near where I live at a pharmacy. It was a CVS. We're waiting in line and I recognized him. I was with my wife. My wife was a big fan of his show. I watched it. It was whatever. I said, "Oh, Mr. Springer, I'm a big fan of your show." He said, "Well, thank you." He's very nice. "Very thank you very much." And she said, "I'm just curious, how do you find so many people go on your show?" And he said, "You understand, it's endless how many people." And probate courts are like the same thing. It's like endless. I mean, we have 500 probates filed a month just in LA County and a couple of those are reality TV show episodes every [laughter] month.

26:22 Yeah, and you know, especially because a lot of those are pro pers. So, it's it's somebody who Oh, yeah. legal experience who just something and goes into court and then who knows what's going to happen.

26:32 Those are the best. You have five siblings and one's pro per trying to file them and the other one's, you know, objecting, but they never filed on their own. They didn't think to file on their own. Oh, that That's like watching a cockfight almost.

26:42 Right. The accusations, you know, of you did this or you did this. It's pretty wild. This is also heartbreaking cuz what I've learned in some of those cases having been involved with them is the parents were so decent and worked so hard and you imagine you know World War II veteran or later career Vietnam War veteran got a house in the GI bill paid off in full raised five kids. Yeah, the kids kind of got crazy. That was kind of the times or whatever but have a house free and clear in LA worth $500,000 and the kids just fight over it cuz that's all the money in the world to them and it's just to me I try to think of what that father or mother would be thinking if they were looking down on it. It's just heart breaking.

27:23 They'd they'd be so ashamed. You know, you see that a lot too where maybe one child is living with the parent. Right. And I get it, right? You lived there, you helped take care of mom and dad. but mom or dad didn't put something in writing so unfortunately you don't just get to live in the home for the next 30 years while your parents while your siblings don't get anything. That's where having a good estate planning attorney comes into play cuz if we have a properly drafted trust, maybe we put a clause in there that says that that child can live in that property for a year or two before the property is sold. That way we're not just kicking them out onto the streets and then the trust can spell out whether or not they have to pay the property taxes [snorts] or the trust pays the property taxes. That way there isn't an argument as to what mom and dad's wishes were. We've got this good living trust that spells all of that out.

28:11 Now, I often get phone calls from people ask me for referrals to probate attorneys and I try to ask them what they need them for because there's a big difference between mom and dad died and we have a house to probate versus mom and dad died and my brother is the administrator and he's not doing his job right and we've been calling him

28:29 Right. That's probate litigation most commonly. And I know that in talking previously you do probate administration as long as it's maybe single heir and very simple and cut and cut. Once it's litigation you I think refer that out to other colleagues or something.

28:43 Correct. Right? So talk about before you the person referring the case you know, why should they pay attention to that? Why is it important distinction between say sending you a good administration case which you'll do a great job on and not maybe sending you or sending somebody like you a litigation case where they may not handle it. In your case you refer it out. In many cases I find that probate administrative attorney will try to handle litigation and they just don't really know what they're doing.

29:09 You know, I think a lot of attorneys think, well, I'm just going to take whatever case comes through my front door. I actually just was speaking to somebody this morning and her fiance passed away and his estate's going through probate and his siblings are asking for priority and she wants priority and you know, the probate code's the probate code. Siblings have priority to act. Well, there are lots of attorneys who will say to her, hey, give me $10,000 as a retainer and I'll help you do this, but they know full well that they're not going to get that client appointed as the administrator, but they look at it as like, well, I'm going to fight for my client and I'm going to make some money off of this. I have had countless conversations with litigation attorneys who have said, yeah, I'm going to work on this for a little while and I'll make some money out of it and then I'll sub out and that's just sad. That to me that's just not my job as an attorney. I don't find that to be morally right. you know, legally that's what we're supposed to do as attorneys, supposed to fight for our clients. That's just not the way that I practice law. you know, I will do probates that have multiple heirs and as long as everybody's getting along, that's great, but if there's a fight, listen, I'm I'm not getting involved. I'm subbing this out. You guys go and get attorneys and spend the next 5 years in court trying to litigate this because you want to argue over who gets mom's tea set. that that's the sad thing about not properly planning your estate. So, when I say I like to do happy law, I'm trying to do a living trust for somebody to keep us out of probate court to prevent that litigation and those arguments from happening. And that's why it's so important to hire an estate planning [snorts] attorney who knows what they're doing and they set up a comprehensive plan for you.

30:53 You know, I'd love to set up a plan where when a client signs on with you and does initial consult, if they don't get the paperwork filled out in say 30 days, you have some service that picks them up, takes them to probate court, makes them watch what probate court looks like for an hour. And they'll come crawling back to [unclear] begging to get the paperwork done because anybody who's been through all that on a litigation side is not pleasant. I do think there's different attorneys that thrive and love that material and there are the ones who don't and there's a lot of it's hard to find the ones who are good at the litigation because typically their fees are high and the money they want to fight over is as a result high. The smaller amounts, I have to tell people like to fight over $100,000, $200,000, there's no real solution. There's no real The law doesn't serve that person. At least in LA County, I don't think you're going to get you can't hire somebody and get $100,000 without spending so much it's not worth your time, I don't think.

31:45 Yeah, and there's a lot of attorneys these days that are taking these cases on contingency. So, now you're going to you're going to get $200,000 inheritance, but you're going to give 40% of that to an attorney when you probably could have just taken your sibling to lunch and sat down and said, "Hey, let's work this out without getting attorneys involved." You know, people don't realize, "Oh, I've got two attorneys working on this." Well, great. Okay, now when they when they already have a conversation with one another, they're double billing you.

32:14 Right. and you know, litigation can get really expensive. when I when I tell people it could get expensive, they'll say, "Well, like $5,000?" And I say, "No, like $50,000 real quick."

32:28 Yeah. and so, you know, it's just so important for people to set up trust to prevent these types of things from happening. Yeah. Well, look, I've got to let you it longer than we had planned. I really appreciate your time. I feel like I always learn so much from you when we get a chance to talk. Ryan Darling is an attorney in Riverside, California, doing estate planning as well as probate administration. His firm's been there for 50 years, started by his father, and he's now the head honcho there, doing a great job. and it's darlinglawoffices.com is the website. If you want more information, then down below I have his contact information. Phone number [phone number shown on screen]. And if you don't get that information, reach out to me. Be more glad to make an introduction. Ryan, thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it. I feel like we learned quite a bit and just continue the chance of discussing with you and learning more and more. Thank you.

33:16 Sounds good. Thank you. Have a good day. And for the rest of you, this is [The Estate Planning Podcast]. We get together every week, usually with a estate planner, though not often with somebody as accomplished as Ryan. I think we're very lucky today. I hope you learned something like I did. please like or put a comment in if you didn't like it. Subscribe if you like this. Send me a note if I can help. If you have any questions, if you're an attorney who wants to be interviewed, as well, reach out. And then if I can help in any way, reach out at Bill Gross Probate on social media. As always, make today your best day ever. Thanks.