Sample Chapter- Prologue:
This is a book about estate planning, estate planning tweaked to reflect those special risks of Target Defendants in a litigious society. So if you are considering the advisability of selling the house, pulling up stakes and fleeing with spouse and progeny to some distant hideaway far from the clutches of those who see you and yours as pigeons to be plucked, here is how to beat them at their own game.

The Target Defendant is a business or professional person of real or presumed wealth. Throughout this book, I will assume that describes you.

Your business or profession involves responsibilities that place you at constant risk of being sued. If you are a doctor or lawyer, count on it happening four times during a normal 35-year career. The accounting professional is sued almost as often, the investment syndicator even more. When you become the statistic, it's a time of endless war and bottomless misery.

Most of the time, liability insurance is both available and affordable. Often, though, the market tightens, leaving you with a hard choice between unaffordable premiums and going bare. You need another option.

Even if you have so far avoided betting the farm on the outcome of such litigation, you must know that it takes only one: a seemingly routine transaction can wipe out a lifetime of hard work and savings.

One aspect of today's environment is of great concern. It is the willingness of more and more people to file bogus lawsuits in pursuit of the big hit, the windfall that means the ash can for the alarm clock. In Chapter 1 are some comments on possible reasons, but the answer is far from clear.

At bottom, history repeats. Almost 2,000 years ago, Jude warned of those, "... who have taken the way of Cain; they have rushed for profit into Balaam's error...."¹ It may be that a society upholding uniformly high standards of personal and public integrity never really existed, but we were once much closer to it. When faced with moral degeneration exemplified by the litigation lottery mentality, our responsibility is to first safeguard our loved ones, then work to reverse the direction of those lost values.

You need not be a Target Defendant to be sued. Employees make mistakes, accidents happen, government often seeks solutions without regard for the effect on lives, and we are surrounded by people perfectly willing to lie for money. So, along with tax risk, fidelity risk, business risk and just plain bad luck, prudent people take litigation risk into account when arranging their personal affairs. Shrinking from the task may lead to disaster, so as Jaime Escalante said, let's "stand and deliver." Here, I tell you how to do it.

Return to previous page