Estate planning and business counsel for families, property owners, and closely held businesses.
Families own businesses. Trusts own houses. Business partners become beneficiaries. Parents lose the ability to manage their own affairs. Plans written years ago stop fitting the people they were written for.
I help families, property owners and closely held businesses put workable structure around what they own and who it is for — and keep it working when the people and the circumstances change.
The practice
Say what you want for them.
An estate plan is a statement about the people in your life: who you are responsible for, who you trust, what you want for each of them, and how you want them treated when you can no longer see to it yourself. The property is only the means. A second spouse and the children of a first marriage; a son who runs the business and a daughter who does not; a grandchild who cannot manage money; a partner of twenty years the law does not recognize — those are the real questions, and the trust, the will and the powers are how the answers get carried out. A good plan matches what you actually believe about your family, which is not always equal shares of everything. My part is to ask the questions plainly, listen, and write the answers in a form that will hold when you are not there to explain them — with no more machinery than that takes.
Build the business so it can survive the owner.
Owners are busy with the business: the customers, the crew, the next job, the equipment, the lease. That is what the business is for, and it is where the attention should go. What waits is the set of questions that only matter later — who owns the company on paper, what happens to that ownership if you die or can't work, what you and your partner have actually agreed to, who can sign, whether the building sits inside the company or outside it, and who is supposed to take over. My job is to look over the horizon — past the next job, to the day the business has to run without you — and get it ready for that day, whether it comes by sale, retirement, disability or death, so what you built survives it and the people who depend on it are not left to guess.
Carry it through.
When someone dies or can no longer manage their affairs, what they left has to be gathered up and handed on, and the job lands on somebody who is grieving and never asked for it — a trustee, an executor, a daughter. The work has an order, and most of it a trustee can do with guidance: what exists, how it is titled, who has authority, what is owed, and how the property gets to the people it belongs to in a way that holds up if a sibling asks how it was done. Some of it needs the court — a probate, a petition to fix a title, a ruling on what an instrument means. Sometimes a beneficiary, a creditor or a co-trustee disagrees, and the administration becomes a dispute. I represent trustees, executors and beneficiaries through all three. Much of the job is noticing when an administration has stopped being routine, and changing course before the family pays for it.
Land outlives its owners.
Land outlives its owners, and it carries whatever they left on it — the loan that was never reconveyed, the easement everyone used and no one recorded, the parcel split in a 1981 probate that nobody checked against the subdivision law. Around here it is also where most of a family's wealth sits: the house, the acreage, the building the company operates from, the rental that was supposed to be temporary. Every time it changes hands or changes purpose — a sale, a division among heirs, a move into a trust or a company, a §1031 exchange — the family's arrangement moves with it, and so do the taxes, the reassessment and whatever the last owner left undone. I handle the transactions, and I handle them as the family's lawyer. The paperwork is the easy part. The judgment is the work: what to check, what to fix, what to leave alone, and what the deal does to everything else you own.
What have you built?
The house, the land, the company, the accounts, the plan for the kids — and how each piece is actually held, which is often different from how you think of it.
Who depends on it?
A spouse, children, partners, employees, a parent, a beneficiary who cannot manage money. The people the structure has to serve, and the ones who may someday fight over it.
What happens when you step away?
For a season or for good — retirement, illness, incapacity, death, a sale. Every plan is an answer to this question, whether or not anyone wrote it down.
Nearly every matter I take starts with one of those questions and turns out to involve the other two. The work is seeing the whole arrangement — the family, the property, the companies, the instruments — and putting enough structure around it that the answers still hold when circumstances change.
Byron Hales
I have spent most of my career working with families and business owners on the legal side of what they own: how it is held, who runs it, who it is for, and what becomes of it when they die, can't manage it, or decide to hand it on.
Estate planning has been the center of the practice since I started, and it has never stayed put. A trust owns a piece of a company; the company owns the building; a parent's plan runs into Proposition 19; a title problem from 1981 turns up in a sale forty-five years later; a trustee turns out to be adverse to the beneficiaries. So the practice grew to cover business entities, real property, trust and probate administration, and the contested matters that follow when a structure fails. I think the planning is better for it. I have seen exactly how plans break, and I write them with that in mind.
I have also run a small practice, taught, mediated, and run a nonprofit. What those jobs had in common is that nobody wanted a lecture. People want to understand their own situation well enough to make a decision, and then have it carried out properly. That is what I try to give them.
Understand what the client owns, who controls it, and what needs to happen next — then use as much legal structure as the problem requires, and no more.
Get in touch.
If you are wondering whether your situation is the kind I handle, the quickest way to find out is to describe it. A few sentences will do; we can talk from there.
- Emailbyron@halesfirm.com
- Phone(209) 432-9329
- MailLaw Office of Byron Hales
P.O. Box 21
Tuolumne, CA 95379
Sonora, California. Serving Tuolumne County, the Sierra foothills, the Central Valley, and clients throughout California.