Alzheimer’s, Widowed Stepmothers & Estate Crimes | New Book Coming Soon

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 protect seniors and their families.

And now I’m proud to announce that I’ll soon be releasing my second book, titled Alzheimer’s, Widowed Stepmothers & Estate Crimes. It should be out early next year, and like The Wolf at the Door, it’s all based on my continuing work advocating for vulnerable elders and trust beneficiaries whose rights have been violated.

Alzheimer’s, Widowed Stepmothers & Estate Crimes came from our team noticing a frequent “perfect storm” in the trust and inheritance fights we’ve litigated. All it takes is a few key elements to create the conditions for conflict. I saw several recurrent factors at work and narrowed them down to the most basic:

• Cognitive decline in an elder, often marked by Alzheimer’s disease or dementia.
• Fractured family dynamics like disputes between stepmothers and biological children.
• Misconduct in an estate or trust, including fraud, undue influence and wrongdoing by a trustee.

In case after case, these phenomena converge into litigation. If circumstances are favorable, at times we manage a negotiated settlement through mediation, an outcome almost always preferable to expensive and exhausting strife in court. Alzheimer’s, Widowed Stepmothers & Estate Crimes shows that the fight to safeguard vulnerable elders and beneficiary rights has just begun, and we’re on the front line.

Hackard Law represents clients throughout California, including in Los Angeles, Sacramento, Alameda, Santa Clara and San Diego. We take substantial cases where there’s a wrongdoer who can be held accountable for their actions.

Call us today at 916-313-3030 if you want to share your story with us and see how we can best help you.