The work divides the way their interests do. Patrick takes the structures: businesses, holdings, advanced tax, and the arrangements that decide what a family owns and how exposed it is. He is also the one who handles the questions about nursing homes, Medi-Cal and the family house. Shadi takes the plans and the people: trusts, probate, and the long conversations that have to happen before any of it is written down.
Between them the practice covers the whole of a family's life. That was the intention from the beginning, and she has already written it down better than we could.
What a family needs at forty-five is not what it needs at seventy-five, and neither is what the children will need on the day they get the call. The firm was built to be there for all three.
Between them they have also spent more than a decade explaining this work to people who are not lawyers: a newsletter, a radio show, a book, and a video library of 119 answers. Most of that library is Patrick's. He is the one on camera for asset protection, Medi-Cal, the business questions and the nursing-home questions, and he has been answering them since 2012.
She does not come from money, and she says so out loud.
