Hypothetically Speaking: IOUs, Lawnmowers, and Professional Boundaries in Fisk, Season 3

Hypothetically Speaking: IOUs, Lawnmowers, and Professional Boundaries in Fisk, Season 3

By Melinda Gustafson Gervasi

November 21, 2025

Six Fridays remain in 2025!  We’ll close out the year here on Navigator with a weekly post about the lessons learned from the Australian comedy Fisk.  Entering its third season, the show puts a hysterical spin on the issues related to practicing estate planning and probate law.  While the show is set in Melbourne, Australia – with its own set of laws – it provides great fodder for exploring the law that affects us all.

In Season 3 Helen is finally a partner in the small law office of Gruber & Fisk.  Partnership may allow her to install a barista-grade coffee machine in the breakroom, but it also means she needs to start bringing in clients.  Fans of the show know that Helen’s communication style may make this new job function quite challenging.  She is blunt, quirky and prone to interrogation.  

Quickly Helen learns that clients often pop out of no where.  Arriving home one evening her neighbor asks if he can give her a hypothetical.  She quickly points out that she cannot give specific legal advice to someone who is not a client.  Unwillingly to pay for her advice, the neighbor does his best to pump Helen for information on whether he needs to pay IOUs made by his recently deceased father to a lawn service.   Taking a twist only allowed in fiction TV series (and movies), Helen finds herself helping the recipient of the IOUs – a highly energetic tween who loves mowing lawns.  This episode leaves the viewer with two important lessons:

One, a lawyer should not give specific advice to anyone unless that person has retained them to be their lawyer.  General advice is fine, but nothing specific.  

Two, in a probate one role of the Personal Representative (commonly called an Executor in our jurisdictions) is to evaluate claims against the estate and use funds of the estate to satisfy valid claims. 

Tune in next week for more lessons learned from Helen and the gang at Gruber and Fisk.  Note, a blog is not meant to be legal advice.  Rather it is meant to spark thought and reflection.  Always seek legal counsel from an attorney in our home state.