The Blue Roof

I am back from a wonderful holiday – 30 days and 6 000 km later I know that I live in one of the most beautiful places in the world. But I will share some of these experiences at a later stage.

 This is my first post for 2010 and I would like to share some qoutes from my favourite fiction writer, Louis L’Amour from the book “How the West was Won”.

 “Freedom is never bought cheaply.”

 “When a dream becomes so much a part of you that it shines out of your eyes, you’d best give it reign. … without a dream a man or woman is less than nothing; with it you can be anything. .. never doubt your dream. No matter how hard it gets, you hold to that. That, an’ your self-respect. Folks will judge you as you judge yourself.”

 “A land needs heroes. Small men and small thoughts come from small dreams. A man is as big as his dreams are. There are always those who scoff and bicker and cower … but if you want to make big tracks on the land, you got to step out and start walking.”

“… whenever a man is asked to be realistic he is being asked to betray something in which he believes. It is a favourite argument of those who believe that only the end matters, not the means.”

 I will try to live 2010 with this wisdom in mind. I hope you have a wonderful and prosperous 2010.

I think I need to explain my stance on lawyers.

Since February 2006 I had more dealings with lawyers than all the previous years of my life combined. And the service I got from them was simply appalling. That is why you will see that I frequently quote this: 99% of lawyers give the rest a bad name.

My first gripe was a total lack of communication. You leave phone messages and e-mail, but they are not very good at coming back and responding to messages and queries. Perhaps because they do nothing (until pushed and threatened) and therefore have nothing to report.

The lawyer who does my late father-in-law’s estate is the ultimate. He died in February 2006 and as I am writing here, the (simple) estate is still not settled and I am once again waiting for a response to an e-mail I sent off a week ago!

In this case 6 months went by from Feb 2007 until October 2006 before we finally got her to do something. She denies it, but then nothing that we know off, happened until we threatened – after 6 months!

Then we discovered that some of my wife’s inheritance was missing. It took the lawyer more than a year (and a complaint to the Law Society) before she could see what I told her “by His grace” – scary if you do calculations by “His grace”. Just for interest sake, the Law Society thinks there is nothing wrong with this scenario! A year went by with no feedback and no correspondence.

Then I got a 1% lawyer. It took him 5 minutes to understand the problem, but still almost 6 months before my wife got her money. Now guess why my wife had to wait so long to get her money! The estate lawyer actually divided the estate and paid out cash (including her fee!) before all the assets were liquidated! Can you imagine.

But that is still not the end of the story. Before I went to the 1% lawyer, I visited a few others. One is a very prominent lawyer in Cape Town. I explained my story, and he did clearly not listen very carefully. Then somebody else came in who was introduced as “our estates specialist.” After a week I got a call to meet the specialist. Very excited I told my wife that we are finally making progress. I walk into the office and the “specialist” calls me a very strange name (he does not even bother to get his client’s name right) and says: “You know, I am a lawyer, not an accountant, I am not very good with figures, just explain this to me again.” Which I duly did. After another week of fruitless phone calls I left the message “forget it”.

All lawyers do the same basic training, but they do not all study exactly the same subjects, since interests differ. That means that all lawyers at least have a basic understanding about most things, such as trusts and wills and estates. The question is, do you want to deal with somebody with a basic knowledge or the one with the knowledge? Before you appoint a lawyer, make sure what his expertise is and how often he deals with the type of work that you require. If we did that, we would have been saved a lot of trouble and I would not have been writing this post. Any lawyer can, very few will not try – the 1% lawyers.

Let me conclude with another experience from this same period. My in-laws were divorced and my mother-in-law had a maintenance claim against the estate. I needed an actuary to do the calculation. I contacted a number of them. All of them said, “I can probably do it, but it is not really my field.” Obviously I wanted to know where I could go. That is how I got from one to the other until I got to the second last one who said: “You need that guy. He is a specialist in that field and is considered a specialist witness by the courts.”

Just imagine the lawyers above saying up front: I don’t really do estates, rather go to … But they won’t, because it is easy money!

And now you know why I am always getting at lawyers and I do apologise to ALL the 1% lawyers out there. Perhaps more should be done to get rid of the 99%!

Tomorrow I will say more about advice in general.