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Beneficiary Forms Gone Horribly Wrong. By Melinda Gustafson Gervasi Within the legal community there is a decent amount of discussion about whether or not our professional lives will be usurped by on-line and digital platforms.  Days like today reassure me that my professional life has a few good years, decades even, before a software engineer codes me out of business. Take life insurance and children for instance.  New client call comes in.  Brief biographical information is provided related to: marital status, children, and financial instruments.  In short, caller is single with a minor child and his best friend from college is named as beneficiary of the life insurance because friend is a responsible adult who will do the right thing.  An actual attorney will likely hear this and say, "wait, tell me that again please" as her eyebrows rise higher on her forehead.  In contrast, your standard online will-writer will prompt "check here if you have na...

Busting Myths & Misconceptions: Reflections on The Grand Budapest Hotel, a Wes Cravin Film. By Melinda Gustafson Gervasi From Hollywood to Netflix to TV dramas, legal thrillers remain a popular film genre.  Recently I enjoyed watching The Grand Budapest Hotel , a Wes Craven film.  Set in a fictional remote mountain village somewhere near the borders of Germany, Switzerland, and France, it is a quirky film revolving around the owner succession of a grand hotel. There is the requisite scene for a legal drama: " the reading of the will".  From the deceased's children to her cousins thrice-removed, all assemble in a dark cavernous room, dressed in black, with an attorney at the center of attention.  Here the legal misconceptions leap off the screen: Except in limited circumstances, the attorney who drafts a will is not the Executor (or what Wisconsin law calls the Personal Representative) of the will; The will in the movie is a massive heap of papers, of wh...

As Summer 2019 begins its slide towards September our family strives to complete our annual License Plate Game.   It's a great way to reinforce the fact the United States is made up of 50 different states (for our elementary aged kids), all with different plates.....and sets of laws about estate planning & probate. Unlike federal law, such as immigration, which is the same from Maine to California, estate planning and probate laws are written at the State level.  Leaving us with 50 different sets of laws about who is in charge and where things go upon your death, as well as next of kin's ability (or lack of) to make medical and financial decisions if you are alive, but too ill to act. Keep this in mind when you are reading materials for a national audience.  For example, mass produced materials about estate planning claim the fee for a court to oversee the transfer of probate assets (those assets that do not have a designation or label on them about where ...