Estate Planning·Business Counsel
I help families, property owners and closely held businesses build workable structure around the things they own and the people they care for, and keep it working when things change.
The practice
Say what you want for them.
Estate plans are about people: who depends on you, who you trust, what you want for them. Property and documents are the means. A second spouse and children of a first marriage. A son who runs the business and a daughter who does not. A grandchild who cannot manage money. Those are the real questions. My part is to ask plainly, listen, and write the answers so they hold when you are not there to explain.
Build something that survives you.
Your business keeps you busy. Maybe too busy for the questions that matter later: who owns it on paper, what happens if you die or can't work, what you and your partner actually agreed to, who takes over. My job is to look over the horizon to the day the business has to run without you, whether that comes by sale, retirement, disability or death, and get it ready so what you built survives you.
Know what’s on your land.
Land carries everything its last owners left on it: the loan never reconveyed, the parcel split nobody checked against the subdivision law. Each time land changes hands, by sale, division among heirs, a trust or a §1031 exchange, the family's arrangement moves with it. I handle the transactions as the family's lawyer. The paperwork is easy. The judgment is the work: what to check, what to fix, what to leave alone.
Carry it through.
When someone dies or can no longer manage, what they left must be gathered up and handed on, and the job often lands on somebody who is grieving and never asked for it. Most of it a trustee can do with guidance. Some needs the court. Some becomes a dispute. I represent trustees, executors and beneficiaries through all three. My expertise is noticing when an administration stops being routine, before the family pays for it.
What have you built?
The house, the land, the company, the accounts, the plan for the kids, and how each piece is actually held, which might be different from how you think of it.
Who depends on it?
A spouse, children, partners, employees, a parent, a beneficiary who cannot manage money. The people the structure has to serve, and the ones who might not always agree about it.
What happens when you step away?
For a season or for good, by retirement, illness, incapacity, death or a sale, every plan is an answer to this question.
Nearly every matter I take starts with one of those questions and turns out to involve the other two. The work is seeing the whole arrangement, the family, the property, the companies and the instruments, and putting enough structure around it that the answers still hold when circumstances change.
About
Byron Hales
I have spent most of my career working with families and business owners on the legal side of what they own: how it is held, who runs it, who it is for, and what becomes of it when they die, can't manage it, or decide to hand it on.
Estate planning has been the center of the practice since I started, and it usually branches out into your other concerns: a trust owns a piece of a company; the company owns the building; the plan for the family home runs into Proposition 19; a title problem turns up decades later; a trustee turns out not to get along with beneficiaries.
So the practice grew to cover business entities, real property, trust and probate administration, and the contested matters that follow when a structure fails.
My planning is better for it. I have watched plans hold up for decades and I have taken apart the ones that didn't.
Yours gets written by someone who knows the difference.
Get in touch.
If you are wondering whether your situation is the kind I handle, the quickest way to find out is to describe it. A few sentences will do; we can talk from there.
- Emailbyron@halesfirm.com
- Phone(209) 432-9329
- MailLaw Office of Byron Hales
P.O. Box 21
Tuolumne, CA 95379
Sonora, California. Serving Tuolumne County, the Sierra foothills, the Central Valley, and clients throughout California.