Live Well, Leave a Legacy
Welcome to Durfee Law Group
Hi, my name is Rick Durfee. I am the founder and senior attorney of Durfee Law Group. Welcome to our firm. My personal and law firm motto is “Live Well, Leave a Legacy.”® The story behind this motto will help you understand who we are, why we do what we do, and how we may be able to help you.
The Back Story
Law is not my first career. I have a Bachelors degree in Asian Languages and a Masters in Religious Studies. Back in the 80’s, I was helping teach classes on World Religions at Arizona State University. I couldn’t support my growing family on what they were willing to pay me, so I decided to go to law school. As it turns out, my studies and research in the world’s great variety of religious experiences and expressions, has significantly shaped how I have come to practice law and serve my clients.
Once I became a lawyer, I was unsure of what kind of law I wanted to practice. So I tried just about everything. I did divorce, personal injury, criminal defense, administrative law, probate, a week long trial, tax work, an appeal, and a lot of corporate, real estate, and contract cases. I even served for a time as a Judge Pro Tem in the Justice Courts where I handled a many different matters including evictions, probable cause hearings, small claims disputes, traffic violations, orders of protection, and weddings.
Our legal system is based on being adversarial. Each side in a conflict has its own attorneys. Out of this contest, in theory, the right answer emerges. As a lawyer, I found that in order to “win” for my client, this required me to compete against the attorneys on the other side. In practical terms, this meant I had to do what they did, and play on their level. Otherwise, my client would lose.
In this process, it became clear that much of what some lawyers do to win is extremely unpleasant. For example, before I had real world experience, I thought that legal disputes were simply a matter of applying the law to the facts. What I discovered was that there is rarely agreement on what the facts and the law are, and what counts as the facts and the law, is subject to manipulation.
Lawyers will argue that the same evidence yields one set of facts and law on one day, and a completely different set of facts and law on another day. Judges get played because they depend on the attorneys in their courtroom for what they know about the facts and the law. Consequently, an attorney’s victory may be a function of gaming the system as much or more than having the facts or the law on one’s side. And too often, the whole point of the so-called game is not to arrive at the actual facts or law, but to make sure that the lawyers get paid regardless of the outcome.
Even honorable and decent lawyers can be subverted by such perverse incentives. I did not want to be one of them. It became clear to me that preventing a fight in such a system is far better than winning a fight in such a manner.
What Matters Most
In particular, I noticed that when family members sue each other, the family is blown apart. It does not recover. Families get over illness, business failures, financial setback, the death of loved ones, and heartbreak. But the family as a unit virtually never recovers from an inter-family law suit. I believe that what is true of families is also true of society at large. Perpetuating conflict for profit or power prevents wounds from healing, and creates long term pain and suffering. The path to a peaceful and prosperous society is through conflict avoidance and resolution.
While I was taking this survey of the legal world, I kept asking myself if what I was doing as a lawyer was making anyone happier or doing anything to make the world a better place. My wonderful wife even noticed that the kind of law I practiced, changed who I was, and that some kinds of law brought out the worst in me, and made me an unpleasant human being. This was not just a career dilemma. It was a kind of spiritual dissonance that had to be resolved.
I wanted to practice a kind of law that made me a better person, and that enabled me to be good to my family and loved ones. This was far more important than how much money I might make. I also believe that most people in general want something similar. People want to be good human beings and they want to have good family relationships. Ironically, these goals that focus on our goodness are intimately tied to our relationship with material wealth. There is a strong correlation between our legal well being and our spiritual well being. It became clear that I needed to find an area of the law that helped people and families be stronger, closer, more prosperous and better.
Why Estate Planning
I found that for the most part, estate planning bridges the gap between legal issues and spiritual issues. Estate Planning is a happier and kinder kind of law. Although it pays a lot less than other types of law, people come to estate planning with what seem to be good problems. They have money and family members that they want to plan for and protect. People don’t want to pay unnecessary taxes or expenses, and they certainly don’t want conflicts and unhealthy consequences for their loved ones. Estate planning – done well – not only allowed me as an attorney to stay out of the toxic adversarial system, it has helped my clients stay out of that system as well.
If I can help people keep their families and their assets out of the courtroom, it makes their lives better. Preventing fights over money makes families stronger, and the people in the families more in tune with what they know to be right. Avoiding conflict also helps keep the cost down in administering an estate. If I can be proactive and help my clients prepare in advance to avoid legal trouble, the outcome is far better than reacting after the fact when the trouble has already happened. The only losers in such a practice are those that profit by exploiting the troubles of others.
I embraced practicing what I came to call “preventive law.” This is like preventive health care. If we eat right and exercise regularly, we tend to be healthier. We don’t get sick as much, and even when we do become ill, we recover faster. We live longer and better. In the same way, with preventive law, by putting our legal affairs in order in advance, we avoid many legal troubles, and even when trouble finds us anyway, it is less expensive and less burdensome to resolve. Our wealth not only lasts for a lifetime, it outlives us and goes on to bless future generations. Most importantly, the family is protected and preserved.
As I worked through these issues with many families, I found that most traditional estate planning focuses only on what happens with material things when people die. Who’s going to get what, and when and how are they going to get it. This focus on the material, without regard for the non-material aspects of life, often triggers the very outcome that people are trying to avoid, and avoids the outcome that people are hoping for.
In general, people want their loved ones to inherit all they have, and they want such an inheritance to have good consequences and not bad ones. This is an archetypal impulse. The oldest of human stories and mythologies in every culture, language and tradition recite and model the transition from one generation to the next. It is often expressed as a god and goddess who give their child or children divine attributes and then set them upon a path where the gift will be essential to overcome challenges that lay ahead.
If we are clever and minimize taxes, avoid probate, prevent law suits, and pass lump sums of wealth on to the next generation, we can create powerful, productive, noble, honorable and amazing humans that solve problems and bless those around them. We can also create unhealthy incentives that set up our family members for dependency and entitlement, and turn them into unproductive consumers who take from others but contribute little or nothing of value to the world. An inheritance can be a blessing or a curse. I have seen first hand that how we give to the next generation changes what the gift does to and for them.
Dynasty Estate Planning
When we look long term and focus on what matters most, the people and their relationships, the plan for passing on material wealth changes. When we are deliberate about how our wealth is going to change future generations, and put in safeguards to avoid negative outcomes, and incentives to do what is required to thrive, the wealth lasts longer and the people are more prosperous on every level. This multi-generational approach is what I have come to call “Dynasty Estate Planning” or “Legacy Estate Planning”.
This requires us to consider not just how things are now, but the complete person as they change over time, in the context of relationships, and relative to the availability of material wealth. Considering the entire picture in this manner is what we call “integrated planning.” Consequently, essential elements of “integrated planning” include not just the estate plan, but also the financial plan, business plan, family organization, and charitable concerns, all addressed as a complete whole, instead of in a piecemeal or fractured manner. Integrated planning also requires input from not only the client and the attorney, but also the CPA, the investment and insurance advisors, and other key people.
To keep track of the various pieces and their relationship in such Dynasty Estate Planning and Integrated Planning, we have developed a color “legal architectural diagram” that depicts the whole family, the structures, the assets, and how they all relate and work together. This enables us to see in a single picture a map of the entire integrated dynasty plan.
At Durfee Law Group, we focus on all levels of estate planning and associated legal matters. This is a multi-disciplinary practice. We not only set up Wills, Powers of Attorney, Trusts, business entities, and charitable tools, we carefully think through how each piece relates to the rest of the plan, and works together for common purposes.
Over the years, Durfee Law Group has gone through various law firm arrangements. I have worked with brilliant mentors, strong partners, highly skilled colleagues, and dear friends. Today Durfee Law Group has a growing number of bright, hard working attorneys, paralegals, and support staff to serve our clients and who share our vision. These younger up-coming professionals are part of our own long term succession plan. We are building something at Durfee Law Group with our clients and with our own organization that is intended to outlive us, and which will continue to serve and bless for generations to come.
Through all this, I searched long and hard for a simple way to express this history, these principals, and these relationships. It was out of this that I came to adopt our law firm motto. It is my sincere hope that we can help you,
“Live Well, and Leave a Legacy.”
Welcome to Durfee Law Group.