Robert Eglet is representing Steve Wynn’s accuser in a new lawsuit that alleges Wynn Resort is still retaliating against her. [RJ]
Here’s a look at Las Vegas Municipal Court’s Women in Need of Change program. [RJ]
Pellicano’s presence adds new twist in ballerina sex exploitation litigation (that also involves Marc Randazza). [TNI]
Judge Andrew Gordon dismissed claims in suit targeting Nevada’a sex industry. [RJ]
84-year old man, represented by Brent Bryson, is suing Sprouts after being battered and accused of stealing. [8NewsNow; KTNV]
Alex Jones’ lawyer talks about “probably the worst day of my legal career.” [ABA Journal]
It Labor Day weekend and some of your offices will close early today–take advantage of that. Get out of there and go do something good for yourself. You deserve it. That work will all still be there on Tuesday. What kind of fun stuff do you have planned this weekend? Whatever it is, be safe and smart and we’ll see you back here next week.
Public Comment period has opened on the Probate Commissioner finalists: James Fontano of Heaton Fontano and Jim Berchtold of the Consumer Rights Project at LACSN.
We do a ton of probate, both uncontested and litigated. I've never come across either of these guys in any probate case. Does anyone know if either of them have ever handled a probate case? Totally underwhelming choices on the face of it.
Berchtold has worked hard getting Self-Help Center up and running and has experience with all of the probate forms. He has never practiced probate law to my knowledge. Fontano does not even list probate as an area that he has ever practiced. I am in probate court regularly (albeit not constantly and certainly not enough to think I could be the probate commissioner) and I have never seen him there. But then we have Stirman, Peterson and Barisich overseeing the commissioner and none of them ever practiced probate law either.
James Fontano is a BYU grad. Never heard of him ever. Berhtold is a U of U grad. Well known, nice buy. LDS? Funny how that happens. Coincidence? There are no coincidences. Previous Probate Commissioners were LDS also.
Fontano is a good civil & appellate. Probate? Never ran into him in a probate case. I don't do a lot of probate but I've done more probate cases this past year than he has done since 2007 per an Odyssey search. If the need was for an attorney with a lot of experience in guardianship, business litigation, and researching laws to create forms for self-help – I'd say Berchtold. If the need was for an attorney with a lot of civil trial and some appellate experience, but very little probate, I'd say Fontano. The problem is they chose a great probate commissioner and then screwed him by canceling the appointment for B.S. reasons. Now nobody with experience and their own clients would apply lest they be screwed just as bad when they're closing their practice and then WHAM – sorry.
Not a single probate attorney in town applied this time around as far as I know. Presumably, this is because the pay is low, the workload is unreasonable and how the county did Sean Tanko dirty. Sean Tanko is well respected. I believe the process requires three finalists. That there were only two begs the question about how many applicants there were. I practice in probate and didn't hear a word about any of my colleagues applying.
The problem is that anyone who knows anything about that job understands that it requires an unreasonable amount of work, a lot of bureaucratic nonsense from the county and poor pay, to say nothing of an inflexible schedule (Yamashita used to have to schedule time off months in advance). So it kind of makes sense that we have two finalists with no probate experience. I wonder if they understand what exactly it is they are signing up for. Do they see it as a red flag that not a single probate attorney in town applied (to my knowledge) this time around? Do they wonder why no probate attorney wants the job?
The county needs to get serious and properly fund the probate department. We need not two, but three commissioners. The staff needs to be tripled.
"But then we have Stirman, Peterson and Barisich overseeing the commissioner and none of them ever practiced probate law either."
Judge Sturman, with her years of experience on the bench, is quite competent with the probate and trust code. However, it wasn't always that way. Judge Peterson isn't there yet, but is working very hard. Judge Barisich seems very overwhelmed by the code and quite timid in hearings as a result. A zero experience commissioner is going to make things interesting, to say the least.
Lets be honest– for all of the adulation for Yamashita, the Probate Commissioner's Office was a shitshow before he left office and now is a virtually irreparable shitshow. Maybe Yamashita did everything he could to whip the office into shape, but I certainly never saw and never heard of him pushing that he needed more resources. He seemed to be quite content presiding over an ever worsening mess. When I heard Tanko was not getting the job, I presumed that he got one look behind the curtain and said no thank you to trying to overhaul such a screwed up office.
I liked Yamashita because he could speak quickly and efficiently. He would let pro ses go on for a bit before shutting them down. If they persisted, he would yell at them which was always entertaining. He did his job. He got some things wrong, but he got much right. Ultimately, the PC is an county employee, not an elected position, and has very little influence in getting more resources. That's 100% on the the Chief Judge.
What visual manifestations would you have expected to see, re: Yamashita pushing for more resources? Genuinely curious.
I know Wes somewhat well, and he did push both the County and the Court Administration for years and years. It really angered him the way they impose high filing fees in probate to raise funds for the Court, but then don't give probate the resources it needs. You can criticize him, I guess, but I'm not sure what more he could have done with the constraints. To his credit, I never once, in the 15 or so years he was the PC, saw him even slightly unprepared. He consumed every filing and knew every exhibit. Wes learned to speed read in college. When I first heard about it, I thought it was nonsense, but I've seen him do it. And his comprehension is 100%
That said, we have had a real gift with Justice Becker. She is by far the brightest and my favorite legal mind I've had as a judicial officer in my career. Also a work horse. I love the way she has run probate this past year and wish we could keep her forever. She is a treasure and a rock star.
I don't know much about Fontano or Berchtold. Maybe they have the aptitude and work ethic of Commissioner Yamashita and Justice Becker. I will say that few attorneys do, however.
We need two commissioners. One commissioner could do routine uncontested, straightforward matters. That could be anyone, if staffed correctly. The other commissioner would need to be skilled to handle the disputed matters and the cases with unusual quirks and such. The county, I can say, does not care at all. They have been approached many, many times with this problem and have done nothing.
Given his workload, Wes had little patience for pro ses. I know he really did try to be patient, but sometimes that patience wore out. Although this was a guilty pleasure, it was quite delightful to watch him unload on a pro se that became surly or talked back. The last couple of years, he really did try to be patient and did make some improvement. He did better than I could have.
Yamashita was very guilty of being clubby with the attorneys/firms he favored. He allowed things to become profoundly bad under his watch. I really do not care about his speed reading acumen; there were profound problems in Probate that lay substantially at his feet alone.
I have seen Yamashita screw up cases so badly that I made a rule that if any probate or trust matter became contested that the case would be bumped up to the district court judge. It wasn't sad to see him retire. I wish Nancy Becker could remain in that position. She is awesome.
Guest
Anonymous
September 2, 2022 11:04 pm
@2:39PM
You are correct with everything you said. Mr. Tanko would have been a great fit for this position and resources for probate need to be increased. My understanding is that probate judges are attempting to prevent fraud on the court by revamping probate code. There is a major investigation into certain law firms filing petitions for summary administrations of estates ($300k or less) which they hold no interest in, without notifying the next of kin. These lawyers are then selling properties without obtaining court approval or providing an accounting.
Many times, these lawyers are appointing realtors as administrators to make the properties look dilapidated to the banks, in order to gain the bank's approval to short sell the properties and wipe out the bank's interest. Administrator then quitclaims the decedent's property to an LLC, and flips the property for 2-3x the short-sale price. It appears our local Probate Courts are being analyzed at many levels of government. While I do not presume all BYU alumni are LDS, former probate commissioners and the firms doing the above dirt all attended the same school. For example, in just the past year, using the same realtor as a straw administrator, a law firm short-sold 57 decedents' homes to the administrator's real estate partner. This business model needs to end.
Whoever ends up being the new Probate Commissioner, good luck and Godspeed.
@4:04p – would you be so kind as to post one case number of a case where one of the 57 homes was sold? I'd like to look into it (no – not to replicate it, just curious who the participants are.)
The Mormon Mafia has run the Probate Racket for a long time now. No one is doing anything about it. Every once in a while, one of the pigs gets fat enough to attract attention, but there are hundreds of pigs for every hog that gets caught. Shameful. I can only imagine how bad it must be in Utah.
There are some areas of law wherein a newly appointed judicial officer, who has no meaningful experience in the specialty court they are now being appointed to, if they are bright and diligent enough can learn the area without too sharp of a learning curve and without too much delay.
But Probate is NOT one of those areas. Even if an intelligent, hard-working attorney is appointed who is a fairly quick learner, if such attorney has zero experience in Probate, such appointment will turn out to be an unmitigated disaster.
I can say I will be happy when the current CCPA and his buddy appointed law firm both get the heave-ho. Telles and Morris have been scratching each others' backs for too long.
All true. Neither the county or the court administration cares, however. To them, there is no functional difference between Krusty the Clown and Learned Hand. Buckle up.
@7:11 you must not be paying tithing on gross. I'm told God just opens up the windows of heaven and sends down invitations to the secret club of probate attorneys when you pay tithing on gross.
Guest
Anonymous
September 2, 2022 11:08 pm
Who can do a traffic ticket in Reno Justice Court competently and for a reasonable fee?
Watching with glee…..waiting for the TTHHWWWAAACCKKinator to join us and get us in line.
And there…..it is.
Public Comment period has opened on the Probate Commissioner finalists: James Fontano of Heaton Fontano and Jim Berchtold of the Consumer Rights Project at LACSN.
#IWantSean
We do a ton of probate, both uncontested and litigated. I've never come across either of these guys in any probate case. Does anyone know if either of them have ever handled a probate case? Totally underwhelming choices on the face of it.
Berchtold has worked hard getting Self-Help Center up and running and has experience with all of the probate forms. He has never practiced probate law to my knowledge. Fontano does not even list probate as an area that he has ever practiced. I am in probate court regularly (albeit not constantly and certainly not enough to think I could be the probate commissioner) and I have never seen him there. But then we have Stirman, Peterson and Barisich overseeing the commissioner and none of them ever practiced probate law either.
James Fontano is a BYU grad. Never heard of him ever. Berhtold is a U of U grad. Well known, nice buy. LDS? Funny how that happens. Coincidence? There are no coincidences. Previous Probate Commissioners were LDS also.
Fontano is a good civil & appellate. Probate? Never ran into him in a probate case. I don't do a lot of probate but I've done more probate cases this past year than he has done since 2007 per an Odyssey search. If the need was for an attorney with a lot of experience in guardianship, business litigation, and researching laws to create forms for self-help – I'd say Berchtold. If the need was for an attorney with a lot of civil trial and some appellate experience, but very little probate, I'd say Fontano. The problem is they chose a great probate commissioner and then screwed him by canceling the appointment for B.S. reasons. Now nobody with experience and their own clients would apply lest they be screwed just as bad when they're closing their practice and then WHAM – sorry.
Not a single probate attorney in town applied this time around as far as I know. Presumably, this is because the pay is low, the workload is unreasonable and how the county did Sean Tanko dirty. Sean Tanko is well respected. I believe the process requires three finalists. That there were only two begs the question about how many applicants there were. I practice in probate and didn't hear a word about any of my colleagues applying.
The problem is that anyone who knows anything about that job understands that it requires an unreasonable amount of work, a lot of bureaucratic nonsense from the county and poor pay, to say nothing of an inflexible schedule (Yamashita used to have to schedule time off months in advance). So it kind of makes sense that we have two finalists with no probate experience. I wonder if they understand what exactly it is they are signing up for. Do they see it as a red flag that not a single probate attorney in town applied (to my knowledge) this time around? Do they wonder why no probate attorney wants the job?
The county needs to get serious and properly fund the probate department. We need not two, but three commissioners. The staff needs to be tripled.
LOL @ 1:11 PM assuming that because someone went to the U they are Mormon.
@243
Pretty sure he/she was asking the question if U grad was LDS. Check the question mark.
Talk about assumptions……
LOL
"But then we have Stirman, Peterson and Barisich overseeing the commissioner and none of them ever practiced probate law either."
Judge Sturman, with her years of experience on the bench, is quite competent with the probate and trust code. However, it wasn't always that way. Judge Peterson isn't there yet, but is working very hard. Judge Barisich seems very overwhelmed by the code and quite timid in hearings as a result. A zero experience commissioner is going to make things interesting, to say the least.
"Coincidence? There are no coincidences. Previous Probate Commissioners were LDS also."
I am a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I can confirm this is no coincidence. We are quite adept at doing work for the dead.
@2:51 I never thought probate calendars would be sourced for names to do baptisms for the dead, but things may have changed since I left the church.
Lets be honest– for all of the adulation for Yamashita, the Probate Commissioner's Office was a shitshow before he left office and now is a virtually irreparable shitshow. Maybe Yamashita did everything he could to whip the office into shape, but I certainly never saw and never heard of him pushing that he needed more resources. He seemed to be quite content presiding over an ever worsening mess. When I heard Tanko was not getting the job, I presumed that he got one look behind the curtain and said no thank you to trying to overhaul such a screwed up office.
I liked Yamashita because he could speak quickly and efficiently. He would let pro ses go on for a bit before shutting them down. If they persisted, he would yell at them which was always entertaining. He did his job. He got some things wrong, but he got much right. Ultimately, the PC is an county employee, not an elected position, and has very little influence in getting more resources. That's 100% on the the Chief Judge.
@8:05
What visual manifestations would you have expected to see, re: Yamashita pushing for more resources? Genuinely curious.
I know Wes somewhat well, and he did push both the County and the Court Administration for years and years. It really angered him the way they impose high filing fees in probate to raise funds for the Court, but then don't give probate the resources it needs. You can criticize him, I guess, but I'm not sure what more he could have done with the constraints. To his credit, I never once, in the 15 or so years he was the PC, saw him even slightly unprepared. He consumed every filing and knew every exhibit. Wes learned to speed read in college. When I first heard about it, I thought it was nonsense, but I've seen him do it. And his comprehension is 100%
That said, we have had a real gift with Justice Becker. She is by far the brightest and my favorite legal mind I've had as a judicial officer in my career. Also a work horse. I love the way she has run probate this past year and wish we could keep her forever. She is a treasure and a rock star.
I don't know much about Fontano or Berchtold. Maybe they have the aptitude and work ethic of Commissioner Yamashita and Justice Becker. I will say that few attorneys do, however.
We need two commissioners. One commissioner could do routine uncontested, straightforward matters. That could be anyone, if staffed correctly. The other commissioner would need to be skilled to handle the disputed matters and the cases with unusual quirks and such. The county, I can say, does not care at all. They have been approached many, many times with this problem and have done nothing.
@2:02 PM,
Given his workload, Wes had little patience for pro ses. I know he really did try to be patient, but sometimes that patience wore out. Although this was a guilty pleasure, it was quite delightful to watch him unload on a pro se that became surly or talked back. The last couple of years, he really did try to be patient and did make some improvement. He did better than I could have.
Yamashita was very guilty of being clubby with the attorneys/firms he favored. He allowed things to become profoundly bad under his watch. I really do not care about his speed reading acumen; there were profound problems in Probate that lay substantially at his feet alone.
I have seen Yamashita screw up cases so badly that I made a rule that if any probate or trust matter became contested that the case would be bumped up to the district court judge. It wasn't sad to see him retire. I wish Nancy Becker could remain in that position. She is awesome.
@2:39PM
You are correct with everything you said. Mr. Tanko would have been a great fit for this position and resources for probate need to be increased. My understanding is that probate judges are attempting to prevent fraud on the court by revamping probate code. There is a major investigation into certain law firms filing petitions for summary administrations of estates ($300k or less) which they hold no interest in, without notifying the next of kin. These lawyers are then selling properties without obtaining court approval or providing an accounting.
Many times, these lawyers are appointing realtors as administrators to make the properties look dilapidated to the banks, in order to gain the bank's approval to short sell the properties and wipe out the bank's interest. Administrator then quitclaims the decedent's property to an LLC, and flips the property for 2-3x the short-sale price. It appears our local Probate Courts are being analyzed at many levels of government. While I do not presume all BYU alumni are LDS, former probate commissioners and the firms doing the above dirt all attended the same school. For example, in just the past year, using the same realtor as a straw administrator, a law firm short-sold 57 decedents' homes to the administrator's real estate partner. This business model needs to end.
Whoever ends up being the new Probate Commissioner, good luck and Godspeed.
@4:04p – would you be so kind as to post one case number of a case where one of the 57 homes was sold? I'd like to look into it (no – not to replicate it, just curious who the participants are.)
I want to replicate it.
The Mormon Mafia has run the Probate Racket for a long time now. No one is doing anything about it. Every once in a while, one of the pigs gets fat enough to attract attention, but there are hundreds of pigs for every hog that gets caught. Shameful. I can only imagine how bad it must be in Utah.
Am Mormon. Do Probate. Please provide more information on the Probate Racket and how I might join the secret club of fabulously wealthy practitioners.
There are some areas of law wherein a newly appointed judicial officer, who has no meaningful experience in the specialty court they are now being appointed to, if they are bright and diligent enough can learn the area without too sharp of a learning curve and without too much delay.
But Probate is NOT one of those areas. Even if an intelligent, hard-working attorney is appointed who is a fairly quick learner, if such attorney has zero experience in Probate, such appointment will turn out to be an unmitigated disaster.
I can say I will be happy when the current CCPA and his buddy appointed law firm both get the heave-ho. Telles and Morris have been scratching each others' backs for too long.
@11:44,
All true. Neither the county or the court administration cares, however. To them, there is no functional difference between Krusty the Clown and Learned Hand. Buckle up.
@7:11 you must not be paying tithing on gross. I'm told God just opens up the windows of heaven and sends down invitations to the secret club of probate attorneys when you pay tithing on gross.
Who can do a traffic ticket in Reno Justice Court competently and for a reasonable fee?
Joey Gilbert
#freethetedactions
#freebonniebulla
#freehulkhogan