Just Because I Think It’s a Good Idea Doesn’t Make It So

After five years, I’ve finally come to a realization. I need to change the name of my law firm. In 2013 when I started practicing law again, I came up with the name “Magellan Law.” I liked that name for two reasons. First, I like the ocean and water and ships. Second, I thought a ship made a good analogy for a family’s wealth and what happens when a captain dies, or pirates try to take control.

The problem? My office is in Scottsdale, Arizona, far away from any significant body of water. And I always had to explain the analogy. I’m still not sure how many people understood what I was trying to do.

The solution? I’m starting a new law firm to be called “Family Wealth Lawyers, PLC.” That’s more obvious. Rather than trying to explain why some Portuguese guy who tried to sale around the world has any relevance to my legal clients, now they can look at the name. We’re going to be helping families with their wealth. We’ll be creating legal documents to help protect family wealth. And when family wealth is in jeopardy, we’ll help resolve the problem.

It’s going to take some work. I need a completely new website, for starters. But this will give me the chance to really start focusing on what I want, which is to help families preserve their wealth for multiple generations. This has always been a passion of mine, and the last thing I want is to get tripped up on my business name.

I just did a little research and discovered that I’m not the first person to make a mistake in naming my business. Jeff Bezos didn’t name his business Amazon at first. Rather, he first named his business Cadabra. At first blush, it’s not overtly that bad. But Cadabra isn’t a great name either. Jeff Bezos meant it to be a shortening of abracadabra but realized, not only that people had a tough time spelling it, they didn’t really get that it was part of abracadabra.

(By the way, you can read about even worse business names here.)

This just made me think of something else. We Americans are terrified of making mistakes. This originates as children. In a typical school (elementary school through university), we’re graded based on our correct answers. But in actuality, we learn from making mistakes. I had a couple of enlightened teachers in high school who would give tests and then have us pass our tests to another classmate. We would then grade that other person’s test. I remember learning the subject matter better that way.

In any event, I owned my mistake (naming my law firm based on my fascination with boats rather than basic marketing principles) and I’m fixing it. Have you made any mistakes that you’re ignoring? I’d love to hear your personal story.

Paul Deloughery is an estate and probate litigation, and law insurance dispute consultant in Scottsdale, Arizona. Visit his website to read more of his blogs or follow him on Twitter!

Originally published at pauldeloughery.com on March 19, 2018.

Reconsidering What’s Important

I’m 50 years old, but I think I’m turning into a millennial. Keep reading and you’ll see what I mean. My family is in the process of downsizing from a house to an apartment that’s half the size. (This is an update from a previous blog in which I said we were going to move to a smaller house.) The reason is to cut our monthly expenses in nearly in half.

In the process, I’ve been aggressively donating and selling things that previously I was holding onto. I’ve tried to include my 13- and 15-year-olds in process. My thought was that they would tell me what items they wanted to keep and what to throw. To my surprise, though, they expressed an interest in my story about various things, but then found a way to politely walk away without committing to keeping anything.

So you have a flavor of what I’m talking about, here are some of the things that I thought I was keeping for posterity that my kids don’t actually care about:

Multiple photo albums of older or dead relatives. (I had thought these were important for genealogy. But it turns out there isn’t much family joy involved in sitting around a table listening to me show old pictures and tell stories about relatives that my kids have never met.)
Knick knacks of my mom’s. (I had thought for sure that my kids would want these. After all, they knew my mom when they were younger and before she died. These were porcelain figures from Northern Germany where my family is from. Again, the kids heard the story, but never took me up on the offer to take these items.)
A 1960’s cuckoo clock from Germany. My step-father had brought it back after being based there, and gave it to his parents. So, it has multiple deceased people’s stories involved (which I thought was relevant). My wife and kids gave me a blank stare when I said I thought we should keep it.
File cabinets full of music manuscripts from when I was studying music performance at Indiana University-Bloomington and the University of Iowa 25 years ago. (I’ve hardly used any of this, but kept it just “in case.” After all, the replacement cost of this written music would be in the thousands of dollars.)

I could go on and on. But this gives you an idea. In all, I’ve donated or sold what seems like half a house full of items in the last 30 days.

I was holding onto these things because of fear.

As an estate planning and probate attorney, I’ve found this process interesting. I was holding onto all these things because of fear. That’s the same reason that hoarders hoard. I never considered myself a hoarder. After all, I didn’t have piles of old newspapers, so I had to have pathways to get from one room to another. But my refusal to let things go was based in fear nonetheless.

I was afraid of the following:

That my kids would forget about their past. (That’s why I thought I needed to keep multiple boxes of photo albums.)
That my memory would not be carried on. (And therefore, I should keep lots of things showing what I did in my childhood, etc.)
About losing money. (So rather than sell bronze sculptures for a loss, I should keep them indefinitely.)

In short, I had what philosophers call a “Fear of Annihilation.” The fear of no longer existing. I know intellectually that this is silly. I’m going to die one day. And in all likelihood, no one will remember me in 50 or 100 years.

Millennials are different from my generation (Generation X) and the Baby Boomers. They don’t care about things (unless it’s equipment for a video game). I’m learning to appreciate their simpler approach to life.

So, rather than force possessions on my offspring, I’m choosing to leave them good values and memories. They are much easier to haul around than boxes.

Do you have any experiences of inheriting “stuff” from a loved one? Or perhaps simplifying your life? Please share.

Paul Deloughery is an estate and probate litigation, and law insurance dispute consultant in Scottsdale, Arizona. Visit his website to read more of his blogs or follow him on Twitter!

Originally published at pauldeloughery.com on March 22, 2018.

How I Made $48,000 By Making Three Tough Decisions

“It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.” Mark Twain

I’m a 50-year old lawyer living in Scottsdale, Arizona. I’m married (second marriage) and I have two teenage children. My law firm consists of me and a paralegal. Here’s what the common knowledge tells me:

I should own a home because it’s a good long-term investment.
I should have an impressive office to attract clients.
I should drive a fancy car to impress clients and people who might refer clients to me.

The reality, however, is that when you add up property taxes, water, electricity, landscaping service, and maintenance, it costs me $3,000 per month just to keep my nice Scottsdale home.

Furthermore, my office rent continues to go up. Plus, I’m not in the optimum location. Plus, I don’t have flexibility in case I want to downsize (like I do now with only me and one employee) or grow (by adding more lawyers in the future).

Also, my car never actually helped me get a new client. I think it helped me psychologically feel “successful,” and from that standpoint it may have helped. But no one ever said they would hire me because I had a fancy car.

Where does this all lead? I’m making some big changes in the coming months. I’m selling my house and moving to a smaller house (with fewer plants to water). I’m also leaving my current office and going into a nice executive suite — which will also save approximately $2,000 per month. And I got rid of my Cadillac XT5 (crossover) for a Jeep. The change in cars is saving me approximately 50%.

All told, I’ll have $4,000 more in my pocket each month. That’s a $48,000/year raise just by simplifying my life.

Has anyone else ever thought about making drastic changes like I’m talking about? Let me know. I’d love to hear.

Paul Deloughery is an estate and probate litigation, and law insurance dispute consultant in Scottsdale, Arizona. Visit his website to read more of his blogs or follow him on Twitter!

Originally published at pauldeloughery.com on February 27, 2018.

How an Accident is Changing My Focus

Join Paul Deloughery as he tells a very personal story that made he channel his focus on his family and law firm.

“Experience is making mistakes and learning from them.” — Bill Ackman

A few weeks ago, Magellan Law, PLC received a negative review on Google. I take these reviews very seriously because my law firm means a lot to me. The review was a nasty comment from someone that neither I, nor my staff, have any recollection of, which made me feel even worse. If the comment had been based on someone’s actual experience with me or my law firm, I could take ownership of that. However, it was from someone who didn’t even seem to have any direct contact with us. My first response was to refute the review and ask for more information from the reviewer so I could address the perceived concerns. My second reaction was to report the comment because it violated Google’s review policy. However, I made a third response that did not help the situation.

The Google comment made me emotional. It’s hard not to be upset when someone leaves negative feedback about the business that you worked hard to build. I decided that I needed a weekend getaway so my wife and I went out of town to the Grand Canyon. (Monday was Martin Luther King Day, and our office was closed.) On Sunday night, we went to a nice restaurant in a town about an hour away, and I booked a hotel nearby. Around 11 p.m., after dinner and drinks, I realized that the hotel never sent me contact information or a confirmation email, so my wife and I had nowhere to stay. I then had the brilliant idea to drive back to our other hotel at the Grand Canyon (which was an hour away). Shortly after our drive began, I careened into a boulder in a roundabout going 70 MPH. I shattered one of my vertebrae and broke my heel and nose. My wife was thankfully ok. The spinal surgeon told me that I was a fingernail width away from being paralyzed from the waist down. I’m dealing with a back brace for three months. But I’m alive. My brain was not hurt. I’ll be able to walk. I feel very grateful.

So why am I writing a blog to tell the world about a poor decision I made? Because this accident made me realize I need to make a change. I feel that it would be irresponsible for me to of gone through this experience without making some personal changes. Therefore I’ve decided to stop drinking and focus on what gives my life meaning (including family and my law firm).

We all make mistakes, and that’s ok. What’s important is making a change after those mistakes are made. Mistakes are our life’s best teachers. We all deal with life struggles differently, and I wish I would have handled this situation differently. But now I am making the most of my mistake. My wife, children, family and my law firm, are the most important things to me and I know that my focus needs to be on that.

Paul Deloughery is an estate and probate litigation, and law insurance dispute consultant in Scottsdale, Arizona. Visit his website to read more of his blogs or follow him on Twitter!

Originally published at pauldeloughery.com on January 31, 2018.

Finding My Focus

Join Paul Deloughery as he discusses how it is possible to achieve a goal but you have to set it in stone for yourself and stick to it.

I’ve always wanted to find one thing that I could become the best in the world at. But finding such a thing has eluded me until fairly recently. My choice as a lawyer to focus on cases involving disputes over life insurance is a deeply meaningful one, as I’ll explain below.

My greatest personal challenge up to now has been to pick one thing to focus on. As much as I love and miss my late mother, she did me a disservice in this respect. When I was a child, she pressured me to pursue music, without ever asking me what I wanted. I didn’t just play one instrument as a child, but a handful — piano, bagpipes, saxophone, bassoon, tin whistle (an Irish instrument), plus Irish dance (like what Michael Flatley from River Dance does). In the process, I never learned how to choose something for myself. Learning how to sense what I want deep down inside myself has taken years. The result was that I’ve gone through much of my life disconnected from myself. I would make decisions without regard to how I felt, simply because they made sense intellectually.

My inability to choose one thing continued to college, where I got two majors. I went to Indiana University — Bloomington for the purpose of getting a music degree. But I never enjoyed the music program. A friend of mine switched to a business degree when I was a freshman, and I wanted to do the same thing. But my mom made such a fuss about how she had personally sacrificed so that I could get a music degree at that specific university. As a result, she and I agreed that I would stick it out in music and get a double major in music and history. I still to this day don’t understand why a parent would discourage a grown child from pursuing a degree with a high likelihood of employment, in favor of a road of financial challenges.

In 2007, when I opened my own law firm, I focused on estate planning and probate litigation. As much as this may sound like a focus, it really isn’t. Estate planning requires constant study of taxation and other legal issues, and keeping up on trends in document preparation. In terms of running a law firm, it requires that certain systems be created. On the other hand, probate litigation requires completely different office systems, to avoid missing deadlines and ensure that motions, petitions and responses get filed and sent to the right people on time.

I recently read the book entitled The One Thing, by Gary Keller and Jay Papasan. It inspired me to finally take a stand and pick a small niche in the area of law — namely, life insurance disputes. I feel a combined sense of peace and excitement. Peace because I no longer need to handle the myriad types of cases that I did in the past. Excitement because I feel that I can personally make a huge difference in an industry more focused on corporate profits than actually providing the service that they advertise.

My personal hope and dream for the future is to be in a position to not only help life insurance beneficiaries get the money that their loved ones wanted them to have, but to also be able to start holding insurance companies accountable. To date, life insurance companies have been able to avoid liability for their complete lack of attention to detail when it comes to how beneficiaries get named. Insurance companies, and the agents who sell insurance policies, are solely focused on selling policies and making a profit. But as a former estate planning and probate attorney, I can tell you that mistakes in terms of naming beneficiaries get made all the time. The result is money going to unintended persons. That will be a topic for future blogs, however.

In the meanwhile, I’d like to hear from you. Have you ever struggled to figure out what you wanted to do with your own life? Have you struggled with issues from your childhood that continue to affect you as an adult? I’d love to hear your own personal story.

Paul Deloughery is an estate and probate litigation, and law insurance dispute consultant in Scottsdale, Arizona. For more information about his advice to maintain a family’s wealth, visit his website or check out his Twitter!

Originally published at pauldeloughery.com on December 28, 2017.