Smithfield Crossing Law Blog

Most of people find motor cycle driving adventurous and dashing. Plus, motor cycles are also popular because they are light weight, affordable and flexible and help people to reach their destination quicker. But one cannot deny the fact that there is also risk associated with motor cycle riding as it is less protective. And injury sustained on a motorcycle can be quite serious because of their high speed capability and little protection they offer when something go wrong. In motor cycle Accident cases—hit by car/ truck or got injured due to road problem, hiring a quality motorcycle Accident attorney is an important step one need to take.

It is always beneficial to hire a skilled and experienced motorcycle Accident attorney because he can better understand motorcyclist’s problem as well as represent your legal case strongly against the wrongdoers. Moreover, a good quality motorcycle Accident attorney will have had not only the experience handling biker’s cases, but also perhaps rear end collisions, multi vehicle accidents, SUV and truck injury accidents as well.

You know motorcycle Accident can quite serious and your injury can take long time to heal. And apart from getting back to work, it can be quite expensive. Depending on the type of injury, you could be missing a lot of work. For most people, lost time at work means no paycheck. Unfortunately, the bills do not stop if you are not able to work. But, motorcycle attorney can assist you in getting the compensation that you need to be able to pay your bills. Whether your injury is minor, but it was not your fault and need to take action against the responsible party, motorcycle Accident attorney can help you with all of legal issues and can represent your case strongly.  Even if you are able to continue working if you are hurt, there can be a lot of extra bills that is a cause of the Accident. You should not have to worry about paying all of those bills when it was at the fault of another party. Victims of motorcycle accidents can seek compensation for different damages and a skilled and experienced motorcycle Accident attorney can help you in great way in obtaining compensations.

Besides that, all the cases are not same and your attorney is the best person who will help review your case, and determine whether or not you can move forward with a law suit. Plus, your attorney may also know what type of compensation will be suitable for your particular case and will have the means and knowledge to negotiate with the other party on your behalf. They precisely know how to get the proper benefits in the event you have to deal with an uninsured or underinsured motorist fund.  Whoever is responsible party, motorcycle Accident attorney can help in obtaining the compensation not only what you need most, but also what you may not need.

Evaluating franchise attorneys and evaluating franchise consultants can seem a daunting task. But the firm a company selects to assist its entry into franchising, refine existing franchise efforts or make franchise opportunity investment decisions will have profound consequences. While asking for a list of references is one approach (and when is anyone ever dumb enough to provide a bad reference?) there are more objective criteria that are not dependent on selectively disseminated information.

By addressing the nine Franchise Questions, topics and subcategories of information discussed below, you will eliminate virtually 95% of the individuals or firms you are considering. Then efforts can concentrate on evaluating the 5% cream of the crop (especially franchise attorneys) that truly merit consideration:

A. FRANCHISE EXPERT:
The #1 factor in evaluating so-called expertise – are the principals really franchise experts? There are objective criteria to determine this:

(1) Have they qualified and been allowed to testify as a franchise expert in court and arbitration proceedings? Being involved as a franchise expert in the franchise litigation process gives a sensitivity and radar for detecting and avoiding future franchise problems.

(2) How many books on franchising have been written by the principals?

(3) How many franchise articles have been published in journals or magazines?

(4) What is their franchise-related teaching experience? (see topics E and F below)

(5) What is their depth of experience in the franchise industry? (see next topic below)

B. EXPERIENCE IN THE FRANCHISE INDUSTRY:
(1) Length of time the firm has operated exclusively in the franchise industry?

(2) Experience on both sides of the franchise fence – working with franchise companies (franchisors) as well as with individual investors (franchisees) who have purchased a franchise?

(3) Past experience principals have owning and operating a franchised business? This factor is absolutely critical. If the principals have owned and operated a franchise, they bring a unique perspective and radar for avoiding future franchise relationship problems from disgruntled franchise owners.

C. COMPREHENSIVE TRAINING & ONGOING SERVICES; CONTROL SYSTEMS:
(1) Can (and will) the firm train your personnel to operate and manage your new franchise company? Remember, you’re entering an entirely different business, one requiring new skills and abilities. If this topic is not addressed in detail, you might as well earmark the franchise fees received when you sell franchises for a future franchise litigation war chest;

(2) Will the firm help you review and update operational (franchise operations manual) and legal documentation (franchise offering circular) on an ongoing basis?

(3) Has the firm developed, and will they help you put into place, franchise marketing, sales control and legal compliance programs during the critical implementation (start-up) phase of your franchise program?

The existence of these programs is essential to ensure only the cream of franchise applicants are allowed to enter the network, and to create a series of documented files should a dispute arise in the future. Most of the legal risk in franchising occurs during the franchise marketing cycle when franchises are sold. If your company’s done a good job here with these programs, then you’ve eliminated most of the risk.

D. LEGAL: FRANCHISE ATTORNEY
(1) Is the law practice devoted exclusively to franchise law?

(2) Total number of franchise disclosure documents (formerly called franchise offering circulars) drafted and reviewed?

(3) Experience filing franchise registrations and working with state examiners in all 14-plus franchise registration states?

(4) Experience represeting franchise companies as well as persons buying a franchise? Knowing both sides of the fence is a tremendous asset.

E. ACADEMIC: UNIVERSITY & COLLEGE
Experience teaching franchise courses at graduate and undergraduate university levels?

F. ACADEMIC: PROFESSIONAL
Experience teaching franchise courses to franchise attorneys and general practice attorneys?

G. BLEND OF BUSINESS & LEGAL SKILLS:
Specialist franchise attorneys and law firms produce tight legal agreements (sometimes overly so leading to future franchise relationship problems) and usually adequate franchise offering circulars. Setting aside the overly tight contract issue, the problem is most franchise attorneys – franchise lawyers are not capable of making sound, strategic business decisions and providing practical, ongoing advice. Some franchise consultants, on the other hand, have good business sense, but lack the requisite legal skills. Questions:

(1) Does the firm have the proper blend of business savvy and in-house franchise legal expertise? It’s always a big plus if the franchise attorney also has an MBA. You can do a Google search with these twin attributes (franchise attorney MBA) and narrow the field considerably.

(2) Can the firm produce good legal documentation (franchise disclosure documents) and help you edit (or create) consistent operational documents (such as the franchise operations manual, training program, etc.) If your franchise agreement says “x” but your franchise operations manual or advertising materials say “y” about the same issue, be prepared to pay hefty franchise litigation fees and deal with franchise litigation attorneys in the future.

(3)Can the firm provide competent and practical ongoing advice in critical areas like effective franchise marketing, media decisions, interviewing franchise buyers, adopting the best franchise organizational structure, implementing a franchise advisory council, etc? Mistakes made in these areas can easily cost the franchise company tens, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars.

H. CONTRACT FAIRNESS:
Does the firm give you an option of choosing between:
(a) an hourly rate and
(b) a flat contract amount, where you don’t have to worry about accumulated hours and an unknown total amount?

I. RED FLAGS – BEWARE OF ANY OF THE FOLLOWING:

• Combination teams where one entity does one part of the project and another the other part. For example, a consulting firm does planning, and operational documentation, while an attorney “they know very well” writes the legal documentation.

• Or, a variant of the above, the company in the “fine print” of its contract, requires your attorney (who you obviously have to pay) to review and approve everything they do because the company (it says) is not rendering legal advice. Actually, by providing documents that affect legal rights, they are rendering legal advice, but in an illegal manner. It’s called the unauthorized practice of law. You end up paying two attorneys – yours and theirs. Besides the expense, it sets you up for future franchise problems. Their attorney represents who? The franchise packaging group, of course, and definitely not you. He or she is typically a recent law school graduate who hasn’t figured out what they’re doing is illegal and could cause them to lose their license to practice law. Besides that, they represent the franchise consulting group, whose interest is to churn as many franchise packages per year as possible. You end up with a bad franchise disclosure document and sloppy franchise operations manuals. To save time, the franchise agreement gets watered down so it’s easier to push through some franchise registration states. Some of the “t’s” may be crossed and some of the “i’s” dotted, but not most of them. The end product are documents that set you up for future franchise litigation difficulties.

• Firms that advise you to franchise your business, and they’ve never seen your business! You’d be surprised how often this happens.

• Firms that say they’ll write your franchise operations manual for you. How someone, who knows absolutely nothing about your business, could ever come close to anything but a mediocre product at best, is a frightening thought. The use of boilerplate manuals produced by consulting groups is yet another future litigation time bomb. You are the true expert in your business. With competent guidance and editing, you’ll be able to produce a professional and workable operations manuals, if you don’t have these already.

• Pricing quotes that seem exceedingly high or low (especially “do-it-yourself” franchise kits).

• If you are buying a franchise, BEWARE of any attorney recommended by the franchise company. Even worse, beware of franchise companies who say you don’t need to use an attorney. There are a couple of these online.

• Firms (or individuals) that have EVER been sued for fraud, misrepresentation, the unauthorized practice of law or violating any franchise law. DON’T FORGET TO ASK THIS CRITICAL QUESTION!!

©1990-2008, Kevin B. Murphy, B.S., M.B.A., J.D. – all rights reserved

For more informaton, consult the Franchise Foundations website.

Get Education on Your Rights -Read and Know Before You Do Anything.

Hire a Qualified and Licensed Attorney for Your Loan Modification

The last 5 years is nothing but violations of all kinds of laws including TILA, RESPA and HOEPA by all kinds of lenders including the big lenders. My bad list of lenders include Countrywide, WAMU, and of course Citi. City has already eaten up 40 billion of federal money, and is still teetering on the brinks of a disaster. They are also at the same most arrogant and unhelpful lenders. Most of the foreclosure mess is created by these bankers, including of course many small bankers. They over qualified people who could not handle the burden of loan. These folks should not have been home buyers in the first place. The example, I give quite often is of my son is 10 years old and is in 5th grade. I give him one dollar every day for his allowance. Imagine if I start giving him instead $100 every day for his pocket allowance. It would spoil him in less than one month and show him how to be financially irresponsible. It is another thing if I open a saving account and put $100 in his account every day. Of course that would be a fantastic idea for his college education and bright future.

There is No More Waiting Required— You Waited Long Enough.

The foreclosure process is designed so that you have time to get back on your feet and save your home. But that doesn’t mean it’s safe to procrastinate. The longer you wait, the harder it gets to get you out of that fix. As soon as you decide you need mortgage help, call for a loan modification help and get started.

Who Else But a Qualified Attorney?

Your lenders policies have hurt you too much. Your broker (former) and loan officer along with mortgage bankers and all the other allied people have hurt you much. IN fact, this foreclosure fiasco was caused originally by combination of all these folks and their unlimited greed. Don’t let them continue this game. We all are hurt by this collective deceptive practice. So let us work together and stop it.

Don’t file for bankruptcy, unless you really have to.

Filing bankruptcy is not a solution; at the most it would delay the process. In some cases, it would jeopardize your loan modification process. Remember Automatic Stay under bankruptcy and then affirmation of debts. They are time consuming things. You lose the leverage and deterrence of bankruptcy to use in your loan modification. I never file bankruptcy before loan modification. In fact, in my law office, I keep them separate and never unify them. Because of the knowledge of bankruptcy, foreclosure, and loan modification: an attorney can be uniquely qualified to cover all these areas and knowledge of all these areas, would be very helpful. Just don’t file bankruptcy at the very outset. It may give some time but it is not the solution. Also, please don’t file bankruptcy just for your home loan unless you have lots of unsecured debts

Do Have Any Alternative Plan.

Why Do Lenders Prefer Loan Mod Over Foreclosure?

-Loan Modification is a temporary help. Get qualified for this. There is nothing to be embarrassing in all this issue. Lots of these things had happened out of our control.

-Your lenders are still difficult to work with; they have built fireballs around which you have to cross.  The secret is that by doing loan modification they are helping themselves. On a cost benefit analysis, they lose more money in a foreclosure. It saves money, and this is a time tested factor that lenders save money on loan modification and lose money in foreclosure.

Let us analyze the situation here in greater details.

• Loan modification is cheaper. They deal with one borrower only and not a plethora of people like default agency, governmental agencies, and the auctioneer and furthermore a new person in the entity who is stills an unknown commodity.
• A loan modification takes place in 30 or 60 days while the foreclosure process is long and it has its statutory limitations.
• The paperwork is less in loan modification compared with foreclosure process. In foreclosure, your lender will assess all kinds of late payments, expenses and attorney fees, and of course a repair for the home to make it at least presentable. All these add up in the cost to lender.
• Your lender is tired of foreclosing home. They have a high list of REO properties, and no one is buying them.
• A loan modification process can slow down your foreclosure process but it is not a safe guarantee against the foreclosure.
• However, as long as borrower is talking, communicating with their lenders, they would not or at least hesitate to send their home to the auction block. Ideally speaking, don’t sit and wait for this time to come.
• Do something now. It is the time. It is your home. Find someone who is professionally qualified to help you. It is your local attorney who has a local office, easy to find and communicate and licensed in the State of Nevada.

1. Put everything on paper. It’s not uncommon for lenders, especially smaller ones, to lose track of your application. To prevent delays, make sure all your efforts are documented and kept on file. This includes all the calls you make and receive, both from your lender and loan modification attorney. Keep receipts of all your transactions, and make copies so you don’t have to let go of the originals.

2. Do your own financial statements. Part of every home loan modification is a financial worksheet, which will be your main basis for qualification. Most lenders have their own forms, but it won’t hurt to make your own as well. If your lender insists on using their worksheet, at least you’ll have all the information ready.

3. Be as detailed as possible. Too much information is better than too little, and it limits the chances that they’ll call you for more information. A typical worksheet for a mortgage home work modification will include the following:

• -Your contact information (address, home phone and work phone, fax and email)
• -Information about your property, including the estimated value
• -Your current income
• -Any additional income, such as welfare, child support, etc.
• -Your estimated total value, including other assets such as real estate, savings and checking accounts, IRAs, 401(k), stocks and bonds.

-Liabilities, such as existing loans monthly bills, medical expenses, and tax liens

4. Keep all your bills. Keep track of all of your bills in a methodical order. Make sure you write down your grocery bill, your utilities, including water, power, gas, and trash charges. Now, add on your monthly bill of HOA, any other community charges, your insurance charges, your child support, and other alimony issues or legal expenses. Possibly, a positive cash statements would be an ideal one to work with banks.

Why an Attorney Must For Loan Modification?

We all know it is very time consuming to talk or even to find the right person for a request for loan modification. We are constantly transferred from one line to another and of course to various countries during few minutes. Well, my experience in contacting the lenders has resulted many times in many frustrating experiences as well. However, when I told them that I am an attorney some of the non sense is washed away very quickly. Phones messages starts returning, letters being replied and they cut short the delaying tactics which are meant for almost all of the borrowers. I meet clients all day in reference to their loan modification needs. Here, is the summary of all the experiences what my clients had told me and my office staff in handling their own loan modification requests:

• We were transferred from one phone to another.
• We were transferred to a dead line.
• The average time of greetings last about 5 minutes, and each transferred calls is started again with greeting on the phone.
• You are advised to identify yourself each time.
• You are requested to send the same papers which you had faxed many times before.
• At each layer, the representative would ask you money.
• Each representative would give you same stale information, and invariably the first answer is “there is nothing we can do”.
• Lots of lenders would give you the run around, attorneys know how to stop this waste and cumbersome process.
• Once attorneys are invovled, the collection process stop the harassing calls. All calls are routed to the attorneys office. Furhtermore, only written requests can be made. All the annoying phone calls can be stopped.
• Attorneys can collect and compile all the papers and can start calling the lenders on your behalf.

A power of attorney is a legal document. You use it to give someone the power to act for you. You are the principal. He is your agent. The person acting for you is also known as your “attorney-in-fact.”

Two types of powers of attorney are the general power of attorney and the special power of attorney.

A special power of attorney is used to give another person authority to do one single thing.

A general power of attorney is not limited to a specific purpose. If you want someone to be able to act on your behalf while you are out of the country then the general one is what you need.

Now let’s say you are going to Afghanistan, on active duty. You want to give your wife power to do just about anything while you are gone.

Here’s a how a general power of attorney for that purpose might look:

General Power of Attorney

I, Andy Rasmussen, do hereby grant my wife, Jesica Rasmussen, a general power of attorney to perform any action on my behalf and to sign my name to any documents needed to accomplish said actions until I return home.
Signature & Date

A notary seal is not required but if you are leaving the country for military service you might want to dress it up a bit and include a notary section. Then sign the power in front of a notary just so your wife doesn’t have any trouble with it while you are gone.

Now let’s say you are caring for your invalid mother. She’s not mentally incompetent…yet. But, she does want you to take care of her affairs and pay her bills. A general power of attorney is what is called for. Here’s how it might look.

General Power of Attorney

I, Sally Smith, do hereby grant my daughter Louisa Lewis, a general power of attorney to handle any and all of my affairs, to include personal, business and other.
Signature & Date

Once again, given the circumstances it would be best to have a notary section on this one and to get it properly notarized.

Durable Power of Attorney

Let’s say Louisa in the above example is worried about her mother becoming mentally incapacitated. In that case Louisa might have to go to court to get the right to manage her mother’s affairs.

What’s called for is a “durable power of attorney.” It’s still a general power of attorney but in this case we’ll make it durable so it continues even if her mother becomes mentally disabled. Here’s how it might look:

I, Sally Smith, do hereby grant my daughter Louisa Lewis, a general power of attorney to handle any and all of my affairs, to include personal, business and other. This power of attorney shall continue and survive even if I become disabled whether mentally disabled or physically disabled.
Signature & Date

For sure you would want to have this one notarized and it would be best that you had it drafted by or at least approved by an attorney who works primarily in the area of estate planning.

It is common to see some very comprehensive (10-20 page) General Durable Powers of Attorney. The reasoning behind these very thorough documents is that some financial institutions are very reluctant to rely upon broad, sweeping statements that a principal has granted ALL authority to their agent to do WHATEVER they would be able to do.

Some institutions or people who are dealing with an agent want to see very specific language that pertains to the actual transaction that they are carrying out on behalf of the principal. This just raises the comfort level of some people when dealing with an agent.

Also, in some states there is no penalty for not honoring a power of attorney. If someone chooses not to deal with an agent because they have their doubts about the power of attorney there’s no penalty for refusing to honor the power of attorney. At that point, one would have to establish a guardianship/conservatorship (which, of course, is not a very desirable outcome).

Conclusion

A general power of attorney can be a very simple document. However, since they can be used so broadly, it is best that they be given more care and attention than a simple special power of attorney. When dealing with the aged or infirm you should consider a durable power of attorney. Have an attorney draft it or at least review it.

Acknowledgment

The information on durable powers of attorney was written with the assistance of attorney J. RobRoy Platt of Lehi, Utah. Mr. Platt’s law practice focuses on estate planning issues.

Disclaimer

This article is intended to inform about powers of attorney. Please seek legal advice in your state of residence if your power of attorney involves any matter of consequence.