I’m Mike Hackard. Our California law firm, Hackard Law, regularly litigates probate and trust litigation disputes. A significant number of these disputes involve fights between a decedent’s biological children from an earlier marriage and the decedent’s second or third spouse. These cases end up in the California Superior Courts. Cases generally considering the rights of heirs and trust beneficiaries are filed in the probate courts and are tried without a jury. Financial elder abuse cases, cases that can be tried before a jury, are often filed in the civil divisions of the Superior Courts. I’ve written a book that addresses in part fractured inheritance, lost inheritance and disinheritance disputes between widowed stepmothe[...]

On March 1st, my new book, Alzheimer’s, Widowed Stepmothers & Estate Crimes, will be published and available on Amazon. One of the central themes of my new book is that cognitive decline is a leading cause of estate battles. In many cases, it is the contributing factor to elder financial abuse. When seniors have Alzheimer’s or Lewy Body Dementia, they are at their most vulnerable, and it falls to their families to sort out the shambles of their estates. Nowhere was this more true than in the case of the late, great actor Marlon Brando. We remember him now mostly for his iconic portrayal of Don Vito Corleone, the unforgettable Godfather in the movie by Francis Ford Coppola. In a career that spanned more than 60 years, he was far m[...]

Imagine you’re out driving in an open area on a beautiful, clear day. You can see as far as the tree line on the horizon. Suddenly, off in the field to your right you spot someone in the distance – it’s an old man in tattered clothes. He’s limping slowly and looks to be in pain; he’s suffering. And then, in the sky above, you notice something extraordinary – there’s vultures circling, just like in the old cartoons we used to watch. Would you stop and help the old man? Maybe bring him some water and call for medical help? You wouldn’t let the vultures swoop down. The scene I described might seem a bit dramatic, but a similar scenario plays out in our neighborhoods and communities all the time. The “vultures” are wrongd[...]

Unless you’re from Santa Barbara, you may not know the name Huguette Clark. She was the reclusive heiress to a $300 million copper and railroad fortune amassed by her father, W.A. Clark, a former US Senator from Montana who also held the distinction of being the founder of the city of Las Vegas. When Clark died in 2011 at the age of 104, she created by will the Bellosguardo Foundation, whose purpose was to foster the arts by displaying her art collection at her massive $85 million, 23 ½ acre summer home in Santa Barbara. Clark’s first Will was written when she was 98, and in that document, she left her estate to distant relatives and her private nurse. 42 days later, however, she signed a second Will that disinherited her family mem[...]

James Brown, the singer-songwriter, producer and so-called “Godfather of Soul” in a career that spanned 50 years, died on Christmas Day, 2006, almost exactly 12 years ago. We wrote about Brown’s case on the Hackard Law Blog more than four years ago, and yet, surprisingly, his estate remains unsettled. Like a lot of celebrities we’ve profiled, Brown’s personal life was complicated, which led to a messy estate. To this day, despite having amassed a fortune estimated at between $50 and $100 million, most of his beneficiaries have received nothing. The question you may be asking is, how could such a thing happen? What’s interesting about the Brown case is that it demonstrates how even when someone is very specific about beq[...]

Country music legend Glen Campbell, author of hits like Wichita Lineman and Rhinestone Cowboy, lived a long and fruitful 81 years. At the time of his passing away from Alzheimer’s disease in August of 2017, he would leave behind some 60 studio albums as well as eight children from four different marriages. With royalties included, his estate has been estimated to reach a scale of $50 million, seemingly more than enough for all beneficiaries. There was just one problem, though – Campbell disinherited three of his eight children in his 13-page will from 2006. For reasons unknown to the public, the country star specifically excluded daughter Kelli Campbell and sons William and Wesley Campbell from any sort of inheritance. Campbell desig[...]

Imagine taking a call one morning from your recently widowed mother to learn of her professed love for a Florida man whom she has never met in person. She and Richard, the love interest, have been talking online for months. Richard, you learn, is an international airline pilot who has been wrongly accused of a crime and is in a Malaysian jail. Your mother sent him $300,000 to pay bail and now the Malaysian authorities want another $500,000 to set him free. She is going to need to sell her house. So, maybe you’ve caught the scam in time to prevent your mother from losing everything. An untold number of America’s elders learn of the scam too late – too late to recover their life savings and maybe too late to bring the scammer to j[...]

California law provides that ‘“Financial abuse” of an elder or dependent adult occurs when a person or entity does any of the following …” The statute goes on to list the actions that constitute financial abuse. The list is well covered in California’s jury instruction covering the essential factual elements of financial abuse. For now, I want to focus briefly on the factors that go into determining who is a “dependent adult?” California Welfare and Institutions Code Section 15610.23 provides: “Dependent adult” means any person between the ages of 18 and 64 years who resides in this state and who has physical or mental limitations that restrict his or her ability to carry out normal activities or to protect his or h[...]

Earlier this year, I related the story of Stan Lee, the iconic creator of such comic book heroes as the Hulk, Doctor Strange, and the Fantastic Four. As you may already have heard, Lee passed away recently at the age of 95. Unfortunately for Lee, the last year of his life was probably not the happy ending we might have all hoped for him. As I noted in my earlier video, Lee had a falling out with his 67-year old daughter, JC, which prompted him to change the terms of his trust. That act, in turn, led to a series of events that turned Lee’s final year upside down. First, a business partner of Lee’s daughter became Stan Lee’s “Senior Adviser” which allowed him to control Lee’s medical and legal matters. That, in turn, started[...]

The year 2018 has been a busy one for Hackard Law - we've been heavily engaged in California estate and trust battles on behalf of our clients, we continue to fight elder exploitation, and every week we respond to the inquiries of dozens of callers from across the state and the country. They contact us because they've seen our videos, they need help, and maybe they just to be pointed in the right direction. You learn a lot by talking with lots of different people who come to you with similar stories of estate wrongdoing. You get to see common features across multiple cases, features that fit into fact patterns. This experience enabled me to write my first book, The Wolf at the Door: Undue Influence and Elder Financial Abuse as a call to [...]