By Jeff Wagoner, W M Law President

I attended a continuing legal education seminar a couple of weeks ago.  There were some very good speakers and some very good topics, but one speaker really caught my attention.  It wasn’t because he was a particularly good speaker or that he had great information for us.  It was because he shared a very personal story about heartbreak and turmoil in his own life.

 When he was a child, his family was in an horrific automobile accident.  It killed his mother, father and one of his siblings.  He was very young at the time, about 5 years old.  His younger sister, about 3 at the time, also survived the accident.  Unfortunately, his parents did not have an estate plan of any kind.  Luckily, well sort of, he had family on both his mother’s and father’s sides of the family that could care for him and his sister.  The problem was that the family could not agree on who would be the best to take care of the 2 surviving children.  So, a court case was opened to allow a judge to make that decision.

The judge temporarily placed […]