Legal Talk

For goodness sakes’ people: Smile! All is not gloom and doom.    The future may contain huge unknowns, but doesn’t it always? The other side may seem completely wrong about everything,  but isn’t there a possibility that there may be the slightest smidgeon of right lurking under the bombast?  Your favorite sports team may seem condemned by a broken ankle, but aren’t there another 54 or so players still running around on...

Your retirement age, in case you are interested, is between 65 and 67, depending on the year you were born. So says a host of government agencies.   That does not mean that the government will force you to put down your pen and pick up a fishing rod when you hit that age. It just means that it is the key age when your friendly government will force you to...

Merrily we have drifted into the world of the internet while abandoning file cabinets, stripping picture albums and tossing piles of unwanted paper along the way. The lure of the cloud is impossible to ignore. You alone hold the magic formula of logins and passwords and URLs where your treasures may be found.  Financial documents and accounts for banking, brokerages and cryptocurrency, frequent-flier and credit-card points, photos, blogs, social-media accounts,...

So you want to live with someone to whom you are not married?  We call that “cohabitating” or “inviting a lawsuit.” Whatever. Cohabitation is legal, but that does not mean it is a relationship you should leap into lightly.  Before you make the move, you should consider the cautionary tale of Stephen Carl Smith and Mary Deneve. Smith and Deneve began living together in 1991. They neither married nor signed a cohabitation...

Talk about alphabet soup. There are at least 200 different kinds of financial certifications used in the marketplace, and it seems like more are being added every day. As you would suspect, some certifications are more meaningful than others. Here are a few of the more popular ones. A CFP (Certified Financial Planner) works with clients to evaluate their options and make financial decisions.  The certification is awarded through the...

It’s possible that when you were in school, history was not necessarily your favorite subject. But to understand express versus implied warranties, a brief history lesson is in order. Before delving in, however, you’ll be happy to know that Hammerle Finley has practiced business law since 1984. We have an extensive online library for your reference purposes, as well as a staff of highly qualified and experienced business law attorneys. The Uniform Law Commission and the Uniform Commercial Code In 1892, as the American economy grew...

MERP is the Texas Medicaid Estate Recovery Program. Its sole purpose is to seize money from the estates of deceased Medicaid recipients and then plop the recovered funds back into the state’s coffers. The government, acting through a contractor called Health Management Systems, Inc. (HMS), does this by filing a claim in probate.       Why is this a prudent financial maneuver by the government? Because although Medicaid is a needs-based program,...

There have always been murmurs, interrupted by occasional shouts, about the dark side of traveling on a cruise ship. Some of the stories – of passengers falling overboard and drowning, burning to death in an on-board fire, being sexually assaulted, smashing onto a deck after a cord broke on an onboard bungee jump – are horrific. If any of these incidents had occurred in a hotel or recreational park on...

“Friends, Relatives, In-laws, lend me your ears.  I have come to bury our relationship, not to praise it.  You need to leave my house now.” Feel free to tweak the foregoing to fit your situation.  Shakespeare most assuredly will not mind. There are few situations more fraught with anxiety than dealing with a houseguest turned squatter.  You might be dealing with an adult child who moves back home for “just a...

During the Years of Plenty, when you could simply throw money into the air and have it return three-fold, intra-family loans were a rarity.   Ah, but that was before the dawning of the year of Coronavirus.  Nowadays family loans are depressingly common, often being the only buffer between economic survival and pandemic- inspired bankruptcy.    If you find yourself lending money to a family member, there are some points to keep in...

Talk about an aging profession. More than 35% of the licensed attorneys in the State of Texas are over the age of 55. Ouch. Just like other professionals, lawyers can retire, move, get hit by lightning, or die. If that happens to your lawyer, then it can leave you, the client, in a mess. You need to protect yourself from the unintentional fallout. Before we get to the steps you should take, consider...

In 1989 the justices of the two highest courts of this great State of Texas, disgusted with the bad behavior of a “minority” of Texas lawyers, adopted a missive called The Texas Lawyer’s Creed. It sets forth aspirational rules of conduct using a consistent theme of the lawyer’s duty of honesty, candor and fairness towards clients, opposing counsel and judges. Little did the justices realize that their Creed contained a...