– Legal Insights –
If you are expecting an inheritance, an estate planning tool known as a trust may prove useful, depending on your circumstances. Among the numerous types of trusts aimed at fulfilling different estate planning purposes, an inheritor’s trust is specially designed to help protect an inheritance. Purpose of an Inheritor’s Trust...
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Risk is like the flu—no one wants it. Part of any contract negotiation involves attempting to reduce risk and liability. This particularly applies to the flooring industry, where the product has been passed between multiple entities that want to shed their liability when they hand the product to a company...
It seems everywhere you look these days another major company falls victim to a massive data breach. We all know about the Target breach, but other notables include The Home Depot, Apple, Sony, the US Postal Service, and Citibank and JP Morgan Chase, two of the largest financial institutions in...
Limited Liability Companies (LLCs) have been one of our most important tools for business and estate planning since the early 90’s when LLC legislation was enacted in Minnesota. Like a corporation, an LLC provides liability protection for owners of businesses and real estate. But unlike a regular or C corporation,...
In the world of collections, obtaining a judgment against a debtor is generally far less than half the battle. Apart from standard collection difficulties (e.g., finding assets to attach and identifying fraudulent transfers), things get exponentially more difficult when a debtor funnels money to an off-shore bank account in a...
Isn’t it fascinating how the same individual who acts like your best friend when seeking a loan suddenly falls off the map once a default has occurred? This can range from the debtor being sluggish in returning phone calls, to literally hiding from the bank for days or weeks on...
For many of our estate planning clients, retirement accounts represent a substantial portion of their estate. And for many years clients have rightfully assumed that their retirement accounts would be safe from attachment by their creditors and that the same held true for those retirement accounts in the hands of...
The lengths some debtors will go to avoid paying what they owe. Having a debtor shift assets to avoid paying a debt is nothing new to bankers. Whether this takes the form of a debtor transferring assets into a trust, “selling” valuable property to a straw man, or simply “gifting”...
Since the enactment of the Minnesota Common Interest Ownership Act (MCIOA) in 1994, a significant number of associations not subject to MCIOA have made the decision to “opt in” to MCIOA – and thus to be governed by MCIOA. What factors should be considered when making the decision to opt...
In all the years of planning and administering our clients’ estates, I have found that the concept of the probate process seems to puzzle and confuse clients. In planning our clients’ estates we look for ways to reduce the need for probate, both during their life, and at the time...
An issue that sometimes arises in a condominium, townhome, or homeowners’ association is changing the number of members that serve on the board of directors. The board must first determine whether the association is required to have a particular number of directors on the board. The association’s Bylaws or Articles...