Are You Fitting Jobs to People?

By Philip J. Kavesh, J.D., LL.M. (Taxation), CFP®, ChFC, California State Bar Certified Specialist in Estate Planning, Trust & Probate Law Hiring, training, and managing employees have certainly not been easy things to learn when it comes to owning my own law practice.  I say it time and time again, but these are the things that we never learned in law school, but yet seemingly take up a great deal of time (and expense) if not done well. One common mistake that I am guilty of making in the past, but that I’ve seen come up quite a bit lately…

What to Do When Everything is Urgent & Important?

By Kristina Schneider, Practice Success Coach Too often for most people, there’s far too much to do and not enough time to do it.  This requires a balancing act of figuring out how to prioritize your work. For most people, the work that gets set aside are the non-important, but also sadly, the non-urgent and important items.  The things that you know you need to get to, but that don’t have a looming deadline to be met.  Those tasks will constantly be backburnered into an oblivion, perhaps for eternity. We implement what is known as the “Urgent & Important” (or…

Why Not To Use Incentive Clauses in Trusts

By Steven J. Oshins, Esq., AEP (Distinguished) Many attorneys draft incentive clauses into trusts. An incentive clause generally makes additional distributions to the beneficiary upon reaching certain milestones. Probably the most popular incentive clause is one which makes mandatory distributions based on matching the beneficiary’s salary. That sounds great until you actually think through a real-life example and the disastrous results. A REAL-LIFE EXAMPLE Assume that Client has three young children. Child A grows up to be a top surgeon earning $3 million per year. Child B becomes a stay-at-home parent to three wonderful children and is one of the…