Mike’s Proud Moments In A Career Of Serving Clients

The last thing I enjoy doing is tooting my own horn. I have always sought to work behind the scenes to make others shine or reach their full potential. Earlier in my career, I was a litigator who primarily did insurance defense work in the worker’s compensation arena. Good results were measured in terms of how much money I saved the insurance carrier. A law school professor once described my newly acquired job as a “Damage Control Expert.” And I thought I was a lawyer! I soon learned that clients hired me to advise them on how to solve problems, whether it was through litigation, estate planning or administration, business law advice, or pension matters. Here are some of the problem-solving results I’ve had for clients over the years.

1. After a personal representative of an estate received a death threat by her stepson, I successfully obtained a civil protection order through the court that covered the personal representative, her minor child, the accountant for the estate, and every employee of my law firm, forbidding the stepson from coming within 100 feet of any of the people covered by the civil protection order. Through negotiations with the stepson, the personal representative called a truce with him with the hope of preserving family relationships. No violence occurred, and the estate was closed without incident. Problem solved.
2. A woman who retired from the federal government began to exhibit bizarre behavior when she began walking to her neighborhood grocery late at night in a high crime rate Denver area. Her neighbors noticed that she began losing her keys on a regular basis, and she often was confused about what day it was. A mutual acquaintance referred the woman to me after she received an Alzheimer’s disease diagnosis. She hired me to help her make legal decisions and to appoint agents to help her when she could no longer make those decisions for herself. Her closest surviving relatives were first cousins who lived in another state and who did not want to assume any responsibility to help the woman. She was able to appoint a trusted friend to make decisions for her. I was able to establish a trust for the woman to allow her to receive Medicaid benefits so that she could live in the best Alzheimer’s care facility in Colorado at the end of her life.
3. A manufacturing company hired me to act as its business attorney. Not long after I was retained, I got a call from the company president asking me to come to the plant immediately. They were amid a raid by the EPA on environmental violations. The vice president of operations was allowing employees to dump metal tailings from the manufacturing process into the sewer system. The company president and other corporate officers were unaware of the illegal dumping. I was able on the spot to slow down the raid, and to get the federal marshals to refrain from seizing items that were outside the scope of the warrant signed by the federal court magistrate. Although the vice president of operations was charged with felonies and served prison time, he was well-represented by a criminal defense attorney to whom I referred him. The other corporate officers were represented by other attorneys to whom I had referred to them, and they all avoided prosecution. The company remained open for business after facing the threat of a shut down.
4. An elderly client had retained a home health care provider to assist her with personal care, cooking, housecleaning, and errands. I got a call from the client’s bank after my client had visited the bank with her care provider. The care provider had taken $1,000 for herself from a withdrawal transaction by my client from the client’s account, even though the care provider was a weekly salaried employee of a home health care company. I immediately arranged for the care provider to be dismissed, and I was able to recover my client’s money. I was also able to secure a new care provider who was also a long-time friend of the client.

These are a few examples of successful results for clients.