Corrupt Judges, Lazy Lawyers & Family Vultures: A PI's Warning

0:01 Okay, as you've seen on our channel, a lot of the cases we work on has to do with probate fraud or even divorce fraud. And this is a family law commonality where anytime there's some large family event, a death in the family, a divorce, somebody going into conservatorship, maybe somebody going into hospice, or even somebody who is getting up in their years and maybe they go to retirement home. Here's what happens. When that event happens, there are vultures within the family that look at it like an opportunity to try to get money. Because a person who is going through a divorce, a person who is deceased, a person who is going to a retirement home, that's somebody who has assets that are going to be changing hands at some point,

0:47 either through a will or through a divorce decree or through a settlement agreement. And when that money is loose out in the wild, everybody's going to try to get as much of that as they can. If it's a divorce, obviously one of the parties is going to try to hide assets. If it is a probate case, people are going to try to get some of those assets before it goes into the will, before it goes into probate, or get more of it than they're supposed to. It's bad enough that somebody in your own family is going to be trying to take something that belongs to you. That's bad enough. What's worse is when the professionals who are supposed to be trying to help you lawyers courts

1:32 judges, guardians, uh advocates, may not be doing the things that they're supposed to do to help you. In some cases, it is incompetence, in some cases, it is corruption. We have seen, sometimes in small towns, where judges and attorneys that are supposed to advocate a certain way will kind of good old boy network help out their buddies. We have seen that in larger cities even, maybe an advocate or what's called a guardian ad litem that's supposed to give certain information to the court is just so overwhelmed or so busy or incompetent, they don't do the right thing. Maybe your attorney that is representing you is not properly doing filings. They're not um

2:18 putting responses in on time. They're not thoroughly investigating the facts that they're supposed to be putting into your case. Maybe they're not calling you back. Maybe they're not looking up the proper case law to put into your complaint, into your case. What does that do for you? It puts you in a position where you're not getting the best result from your case. Look, anytime there's a major civil court case litigation divorce probate that's something that's serious. That is a legal matter in front of a government agency that's supposed to decide things the right way. If that agency is either getting wrong

3:06 information from the parties or getting a poor performance from your attorney, your chances are much lower of prevailing the way it's supposed to go. What if the court itself is corrupted? We've seen cases where a judge or a court clerk or an assistant has some ties to the opposition party, to you. That can affect your case. What if the attorney representing the other side has some undue influence on the court? That could affect your case negatively. Even your own attorney, because of the fact that they are maybe not experienced in this area of the law, are not actively

3:52 prosecuting your case. What do you do about this? Well, first thing to do is, obviously hindsight is 20/20, pick a good representative. The way you get an attorney that's good is not just to call somebody out of the phone book or look up somebody online and call the first person you see. What you should do is look at selecting an attorney, a law firm, the same way you would select some other important decision. When you buy a house, you don't just look at the first house and say, "I'll buy it." You may look at 15 or 20 homes in your area before you pick the one that's right for you. Same thing with attorneys. We recommend looking at between 16 and 20 law firms and attorneys, checking out their practice area on their website to see if they handle these kind of cases, actually look at cases they have handled. You can

4:38 look at the public records of an attorney in court to see what cases they've handled, which ones they've won, which ones they've lost, what kind of arguments they've made, what kind of motions they filed, uh what type of results they've received. Did they win or lose? Are they current? Is the last time they did a case 5 years ago? Are they doing cases every month? You can see all these things. It's all public. It's all visible if you know where to look. Once you've selected an attorney, interviewing them properly to make sure that they are on your side, they're not dismissing you, they're not just kind of rolling their eyes at your case, they're really hearing what you're all about. Obviously, if you're having a problem with your attorney now, that's water under the bridge. Maybe the next one you hire will be better. What

5:25 do you do about the current one? Well, do the same research. Find out what type of filings they've done in your case. Look at the filings. Have them looked at by another attorney. Even if you spend a few hundred dollars to have another law firm review your attorney's filings, they can tell you, "Yeah, [snorts] these maybe not that are not that great." You also want to give your attorney as much information and ammunition as you can to help them support you. And that comes from an investigation. Attorneys are not investigators. They don't look up records. They don't do investigation of of fraud. They don't do investigations of activities. They just file. They're good with the the administrative filing and knowledge of the court system. They're not strategic in many cases. They're not going to be

6:11 looking up records, figuring out what's the best way to to get an advantage. That's more of a an investigative function. And we see that all the time. Most of the work we do are for attorneys. As a licensed private investigative agency, our practice area has to do with these kind of cases and fraud and embezzlement and asset searches. So, when you are looking to partner with an attorney, make sure you're giving them all the tools and all the ammunition they could use to give you the highest and best probability of getting the result you want in your case. And that's where an investigation may come in. And if you want some more suggestions on what type of investigation to might help your case, you can click the link below.

6:58 You can do a consultation with a licensed investigator and see what might help your case or maybe what might not help your case. Maybe your case is is too far gone. But at least you'll know and you'll be able to sleep at night where you're at in your case, where you're at with your your um defending your rights to get what's supposed to come to you in a divorce, in a probate case, in any kind of civil litigation, even a lawsuit against you or you against somebody else. You don't want to lose because your attorney did something that is not um in your best interest.