Listen into the interesting interview with Joseph McHugh. Rick and Joseph discuss the ins and outs of his law practice, some of the more tricky cases he's dealt with, as well as how Joseph works with his clients.
What kind of work do you like to do?
Joe's background of working at Disney gave him a taste for contract administration and project management. While he was working at Disney, he got a lot of questions about probate and estate planning. His wife eventually pointed him in the direction of focusing on the field.
Joe realized that he could protect people and their assets and grew to enjoy the work. He started off with a lot of referrals from a CPA firm that he worked with and this lead him to get into elder law where he could help people in very difficult situations.
There has been so much bad advice that has been given out about elder law. Joe deals with a lot of MediCal cases because a lot of people don't realize what the requirements are. He gets quite a few cases that are in crisis mode by the time they come to him.
California is the only state that hasn't adopted a deficit reduction act. This allows California to do a lot of other things that the other states can't take advantage of. In many cases MediCaid falls short in ways that don't apply in California.
Have you encountered any really difficult cases?
Joseph talks about a story where a woman who was on MediCal and had died and her family had to deal with a $250,000 MediCal claim on the home. During the conversation, the family may have been under the impression that he was willing to disable one of them with an axe.
He tells another story of a case where a woman who passed away was sold two promissory notes. The slippery part was that they were 30 year notes and the woman was 91 years old. Rick refers to this as an equity-ectimy, Joe calls it elder abuse. A lot of elders are preyed upon by bad people.
Burbank is turning out to be a great source for cold calls from people looking for estate planning and elder law. Joe also gets quite a few referrals from sources like Yelp and Google searches.
Any parting words for the listeners?
People should really be looking at the preventative stuff. There are a few documents that you should have which are power of attorney and advanced health care directive. You should try to avoid a conservatorship being taken out on you as much as you can. Do some pre-planning now and save your family a lot of grief later on.
Links To Resources Mentioned
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