San Diego Estate Planning Lawyer Blog

In Miramar, as with other neighborhoods of San Diego, fire and smoke are life threatening issues. The San Diego Fire Department has information which is very useful. Many local stores such as the Home Depot have these smoke detectors. Our law firm of Pinkerton, Doppelt & Associates, LLP does not endorse any particular store. If you need assistance with a legal matter, please feel free to contact our firm by e mail or phone.

If you could pay $10 and, in return, get a guard who would warn your family if your house caught fire, would you? Of course you would. Despite this, most people do not have enough smoke detectors in their homes--detectors that will stand guard over your family's lives 24 hours a day. The evidence shows that using even an inexpensive smoke detector increases your family's chance of surviving a house fire by 50%, making it one of the best investments you can make for your family's safety.

Experts recommend installing smoke detectors, the cheapest of which start at about $10, throughout your house. At a minimum, install one detector for every floor and one outside of each bedroom. Test your smoke alarms once a month, and replace the batteries once a year. Make sure that every member of your family knows (1) what to do when the smoke alarm sounds, and (2) the fire escape route from each room. A little advance planning can help make sure that you and your family have a better chance if a fire should start in the night.

In Mira Mesa, many people hold their real property in a revocable living trust. This is to protect their beneficiaries from probate fees and costs and to try and insure privacy in the distribution of their estate. In the below case [not from Mira Mesa] homes were taken from people without their consent and this affected their estate plan. Our firm of Pinkerton, Doppelt & Associates, LLP would be pleased to offer you a complimentary and confidential consultation either by phone, in person or e mail.

In one of the most controversial eminent domain decisions ever, the United States Supreme Court ruled in 2005 that a city's exercise of its eminent domain powers to take private property in furtherance of an economic development plan satisfied the constitutional requirement that such power be used only for a "public use," even though private developers stood to profit handsomely from the city's actions. In reaction to that ruling, some state legislatures have been busy crafting legislation to limit the use of condemnation powers in such circumstances. For their part, the owners of property targeted for condemnation have considered how they still might fend off the taking, or, failing that, how to maximize the compensation that the government must pay.

In a recent case, a landowner was not able to defeat a condemnation initiated by a city so that a new hotel could be built on the property, but he did receive maximum compensation from an obviously sympathetic jury. The landowner was an immigrant who had spent two years and a lot of money renovating a warehouse and building a mail-order cigar business. When two private developers were unsuccessful in negotiations to buy the property as a site for a hotel, they instead reached an agreement with the city whereby the city would condemn the property for their desired use and the developers would pay the costs and fees associated with the condemnation.

When the city was first attempting to buy the property, it sent the landowner a toxic waste notice requiring him to investigate whether any toxins existed in the ground. The landowner tried to comply, but after spending many thousands of dollars he found no toxins. The city would later admit in the litigation that such an investigation was not really feasible so long as a building remained on the property. The toxic waste notice, and especially its suspicious timing, came to be seen as a tactic to put pressure on the landowner during the negotiations leading up to the condemnation.

Continue reading " Mira Mesa: Eminent Domain Update " »

In Rancho Penasquitos, there are many employers who use screening tests for employment. Our law firm of Pinkerton, Doppelt & Associates, LLP does not practice in employment law and can refer you to the San Diego County Bar Association Lawyer Referral Service if you need legal assistance in this area. If you need legal assistance in estate planning or family law, please feel free to contact our firm for a complimentary and confidential consultation either in person, over the phone or by e mail.

It is popular now for employers to use screening tests, often administered on the Internet, to weed out a large portion of applicants for job openings before making the more difficult selections from among those who survive that first cut. Such tests are supposed to measure cognitive ability, personality characteristics, or, in fewer instances, the ability to perform in a simulation of the duties that the job requires. The easily administered and scored screening tests have their appeal, especially if you are charged with filling, say, 10 positions from 100 people who have submitted résumés.

A downside to screening tests is the risk that rejected applicants may persuade a court that the tests essentially were a tool to accomplish prohibited discrimination, even though that may not have been the employer's intent. For example, an employment test that impacts racial minorities or women disproportionately could lead to liability unless the employer can show that the test is sufficiently related to the job and is necessary to the employer's business.

Another potential pitfall stems from the prohibition in the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) against medical testing of job applicants. There sometimes is a fine distinction between acceptable personality or psychological tests and prohibited medical tests. The screening of applicants also could run afoul of some state statutes that protect against invasions of privacy.

When individuals adversely affected by a personality test challenged the test in federal litigation under the ADA, an appellate court struck down the test. The test, at least in some of its 502 questions, was a prohibited examination of the applicants' mental health. Its true or false questions went much farther than the acceptable lines of inquiry about matters such as working well in groups or in a fast-paced office. Instead, they ventured into the realm of psychiatric disorders. In this case, a prospective manager of a rent-to-own store could not be required to give true or false answers to statements such as: "I see things or animals or people around me that others do not see"; "At times I have fits of laughing and crying that I cannot control"; or "My soul sometimes leaves my body."