Fiducia Legal serves clients throughout Los Angeles and Orange County in the following practice areas:

Trusts and Estates

Estate Planning:  Our office represents clients in drafting, executing and maintaining their estate plans to ensure their assets are distributed according to their wishes in the most orderly and efficient manner possible.  We help individuals and married couples implement an estate plan suited to their particular situation, taking into account the client's goals, needs, desires, and the nature of assets held.  We provide all the necessary documents, including trusts, wills, durable power of attorney, advance healthcare directives, transfer deeds, property agreements, and much more.

Family Trusts:  Our firm assists clients in establishing various trusts that best suits their needs, ranging from basic trusts to complex trusts that offer estate tax savings. We will sit down with you and inform you of your options so you can make an informed decision.  We will also counsel you on any tax ramifications as it applies to your situation.

Document Review and Amendments:  If you have experienced life-changing events (i.e birth of a child, marriage, divorce, death in the family, etc.), we can review your trust and estate documents to make any necessary changes and updates so that your best interests are served.

Probate & Trust Administration:  We handle post-death administration of a love-one's estate. We can assist in the settling of a trust and distribution of its assets.  In certain situations, when a court proceeding called probate may be required, our firm can handle the entire probate process from start to finish.  We are sensitive to these situations and always make sure we provide the most efficient services possible — making the process as seamless as possible.

Asset Protection:  We can help you implement a strategy to protect your hard-earned personal and business assets from creditors and catastrophic liability. In creating a plan to reduce any possible financial exposure, we will evaluate your insurance needs, assets held, tax liability issues and coordinate your strategy with your estate or business succession planning, i.e. family trusts.

Business Law

Business Formation: We can assist you in fulfilling the legal requirements of starting a business, including helping you choose the right business form that is suitable to your situation and handling the setup of your business.

Business Transactions: Our firm helps clients in every phase of business, as they develop and carry out their business plans.  We review, negotiate, and draft contracts and agreements for our clients, and represent clients as they

• enter business deals with other businesses
• hire employees and independent contractors;
• purchase and sell businesses; or merge with other businesses;
• license, sell, acquire, and protect copyright, trademark, and other intellectual property assets;
• comply with federal, state and local laws;
• try to resolve conflicts before they explode into lawsuits; and prevent or minimize the risk of claims;
• engage in other activities relevant to their business.

General Counsel for Small Businesses:  We would like to serve your business on a continuous long-term basis.  If your business is small or even medium-sized, it may not be economically feasible to hire a full-time general counsel, but your business may constantly face legal issues on a daily basis.  So we would like to serve as your general counsel, offering your business a full scope of services that you would normally enjoy from an in-house counsel at a fraction of the cost.  We would be on-call to serve you on a regular basis.  We believe that having a strong relationship with you through frequent contact and communication would allow us to better understand your business, and enable us to better tailor our services to meet your needs, including protecting your business from costly litigation. (Stay tunes. General counsel packages will be offered sometime this year)

Business Succession Planning:  Establishing a sound business succession plan is a must-have for most business owners. For business owners that are at or near retirement, the issue of succession cannot be ignored.  As a business owner, you would consider what would happen to the business after you are gone.  Do you want to pass it to your heirs or have it sold?  We can advise you on methods of transferring a business upon death, include cross-purchase agreements utilizing life insurance as a transfer vehicle.