Mcle Article: What to Do if an Attorney Becomes Incapacitated or Dies?

• Jurisdiction: California,United States
• Citation: Vol. 26 No. 1
• Publication year: 2020
• Author: By Evie Jeang and Ritzel Starleigh Ngo
• topic: Business of Law,Trust Law,Civil Procedure,Wills, Trusts and Estates

MCLE Article: What to Do If an Attorney Becomes Incapacitated or Dies?

By Evie Jeang and Ritzel Starleigh Ngo

Evie Jeang is an accomplished founder of a thriving law firm at Ideal Legal Group. As well as an advisor, spokesperson, and board member of public and private companies. She is an expert in the matters pertaining to international and domestic family law, including but not limited to dissolution of marriage, child custody, child support, spousal support, child visitation, domestic violence and the new trendy assisted technology reproduction law (ART).

Ritzel Starleigh Ngo is a family law attorney/Partner at Ideal Legal Group, Inc. Ms. Ngo is experienced in contentious dissolutions; parentage matters; child custody and visitation, spousal and child support; property division; temporary and permanent restraining orders; including domestic violence, elder abuse, and civil harassment. She initially received family law training from the Los Angeles County Bar Association's ("LACBA") Domestic Violence Project. She has practiced in Los Angeles, Santa Clara, San Francisco, Alameda, Orange, Ventura, San Diego, San Bernardino, and Riverside counties.

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As a sole practitioner or an attorney working in a small firm, we rarely plan for the inevitable; death, and/or incapacitation. It is important that the attorneys takes steps to ensure that their client is protected if the attorney should become incapacitated, disabled, disappear, disbarred, and/or dies. Lawyers have a fiduciary duty protect their clients, to create a plan and to prepare for a personal disaster in the event that they become incapacitated or die. If lawyers who do not have a succession plan in the event of death or incapacity, that leaves their clients matters and their small firm in jeopardy.

HOW DOES CALIFORNIA DEFINE INCAPACITY?

Under the California Probate Code section 810-13, California defines incapacity as an inability to make decisions or perform certain acts when at least one of the mental functions are impaired or, lacking such as inability to understand or communicate with others, problems recognizing familiar people and objects, failure to reason logically, presence of delusions and/ or hallucinations among other things. In California, incapacity is initially determined by a treating physician.

WHO IS RESPONSIBLE?

In the event that a lawyer dies or becomes incapacitated, typically the executor of the...