Episode 34: Conversation with Alan Spears (Court Appointed Guardian of Assets)

Alan Spears:

The clients you have, they’re no longer physically or mentally capable of making those kinds of decisions as to what to do with the money they’ve been awarded from the traumatic accident that they’ve been through, and so that’s where coming to a corporate guardian makes a lot of sense for the family. Because again, many people are simply not equipped with the skills and the experience and the knowledge to manage the affairs, the business affairs, of the protected person.

David Craig – Host:

I’m Attorney Dave Craig, managing partner and one of the founders of the law firm of Craig, Kelley & Faultless. I’ve represented people who have been seriously injured or who have had a family member killed in a semi or other big truck wreck for over 30 years.

Following the wreck, their lives are chaos. Often, they don’t even know enough about the process to ask the right questions. It is my goal to empower you by providing you with the information you need to protect yourself and your family. In each and every episode I will interview top experts and professionals that are involved in truck wreck cases. This is After the Crash.

Today, we have Alan Spears as our guest. Alan is a senior Vice President and Chief Wealth Management Officer at First Bank Richmond. He leads the bank’s trust and investment service department, which he started for the bank about 19 years ago. Alan is a native of Richmond, Indiana and he holds three degrees from Indiana University, a bachelor’s in political science, a master’s in public administration, and a law degree from the Robert McKinney School of Law.

He has over 30 years of experience in wealth management with a particular focus on investment and estate planning. Prior to joining First Bank Richmond, in 2003, he led the Major in Planning and Giving Program at the Indiana University Foundation for eight years.

And before that, he was in charge of the trust department at Bank One, Richmond. Alan’s been active in the Richmond community in a variety of ways. He’s serving on the governing board of Reid Health and as chair of the board for the Cope Environmental Center. He’s also the past board chair of the Wayne County Community Foundation, and he serves on the board of the Richmond or of the Reid Health Foundation. Welcome to the podcast, Alan.

Alan Spears:

Well, thank you. Glad to be here. Thanks for the nice introduction, sounds very impressive.

David Craig – Host:

It is very impressive. So, you’ve been doing this for a while and that always helps. Tell us a little bit, I guess why, I mean, you’re an attorney, you have these other degrees, you obviously had a lot of interest in different things, what drove you to wealth management and estate planning?

Alan Spears:

Sure, happy to share that. Well, right out of law school, I got hired by Bank One, which is no longer around, they were absorbed by Chase, to come back to Richmond and go to work in the trust department at Bank One, Richmond, which had been the Old First National Bank of Richmond. As you know, many of our local banks were bought up in the late eighties, early nineties by bigger banks and First National was acquired by Bank One.

And I just found as I got into that business, I had an aptitude for connecting with people. The word trust is not just the business, it’s what you’re building with your clients, and I had the ability to connect with them in a way that they became valued clients who trusted me, trusted my judgment, trusted the guidance that I would provide them.

Over time, that skillset transferred to IU, my alma mater, to the IU Foundation where leading their major in Planned Giving Program, we were tasked with getting all sorts of large gifts, gifts of stock, real estate, trust, bequest, things of that nature. So, that skillset of connecting with people has been the common thread running through my career leading me back here to Richmond, my hometown, to First Bank, Richmond, where I started the trust department here 20 years or so ago.

David Craig – Host:

Obviously, this podcast is for folks who’ve been in serious wrecks with semis or commercial motor vehicles or big trucks or who have had devastating injuries. I think one of the things that people don’t know is what happens if you have a catastrophic injury, like a brain injury, and you’re unable to take care of yourself, and so, who takes care of the money? The average person that’s never been through this has no idea how that works.

How is someone taken care of, who pays the bills, who makes sure the money’s invested properly, who makes sure that 20 years or however many years this person has to live, that they’re going to have enough money to take care of their needs? Lawyers like myself who practice in this area, we like to involve people who do wealth management and the trust and become the guardian of the assets and take care of and protect the ward or the person who’s been injured.

Because without that, then you would have a situation where maybe people who are unskilled, family members, relatives, friends might do that, and the courts frown upon that, as they should, because they want experienced people to take care of the money. That’s something that people don’t even think about. I know from personal experience that people don’t even think about that. We like to involve them early, even before we have the money, and sometimes they even go to trial with us.

It’s important, I think, for the juries to understand that the family’s not just getting this big chunk of money, but this money is going to be taken care of and managed professionally with supervision for the benefit of the person who is injured. So, that’s why we’ve invited Alan to be on this podcast.

Alan has great experience beyond just this area, but this is one area in which Alan works, making sure that for people who have these types of injuries, money is invested properly and taken care of, and that the injured party is taken care of. He works with, right now, he’s with and has been for a number of years with First Bank Richmond. First Bank Richmond is a community-oriented financial institution headquartered in Richmond, Indiana. First Bank Richmond provides full banking services in Richmond as well as it has what, you have eight branches, is that right?

Alan Spears:

Yes.

David Craig – Host:

In Indiana, and then you also have branches in Ohio, correct?

Alan Spears:

Correct. Through our sister bank, Mutual Federal.

David Craig – Host:

So, it’s a large banking institution and it has a trust department, and that’s how Alan and I met is that Alan is actually a guardian of the assets of one of my clients. We’re going to talk a little bit about what all that means and how that works, but again, welcome to the podcast. Tell us a little bit about First Bank Richmond.

Alan Spears:

Sure. Happy to share that with your audience. As you mentioned, we are a community bank. We started over 135 years ago here in Richmond. We started out as a Savings and Loan, and we were a Savings and Loan up until probably the mid-nineties, and we became a National Bank. So, we had a national charter. Kept that national charter up until about 2020 or so, 2019, and we became a state-chartered bank.

So, we’re governed by the Indiana Department of Financial Institutions. For most of the history of the bank, we were a mutual, meaning we were owned by our depositors, but in 2019, we went public, and we had an initial public offering and became a publicly traded bank. That was a way of infusing capital into the bank so that we could better serve our customers, grow our operations, and our footprint throughout Indiana and into Ohio.

We are a publicly traded bank, and we are traded on the NASDAQ under the name of Richmond Mutual Bank Corporation, which is the holding company. The ticker symbol is RM as in mutual, BI, RMBI is our ticker. So again, for most of the span of time, we were a mutual, became a public bank just about four years ago. One of the things that has not changed throughout the 100 plus years at the bank is our commitment to the community.

We are one of the largest supporters, if not the largest corporate supporter of nonprofits here in the Richmond and Wayne County, Indiana area. One of the things we did when we went public is we started a community foundation, the First Bank Richmond Community Foundation, which is used to make grants throughout our community supporting numerous causes.

We give out significant sums of money every year, and one of the reasons that’s so important is as you know, many of the larger banks aren’t as invested in the communities, particularly the smaller communities around the state. So, we felt a real obligation to be a good corporate citizen, and that’s been something this bank has done throughout its history.

David Craig – Host:

Yeah, and I think that’s extraordinarily important. I mean, Craig, Kelley & Faultless has an office in Richmond, Indiana as well. I was actually born in Richmond and spent some time there and still have family there in Eaton and in Darke County, Ohio, Preble County, Ohio, so that kind of area, Wayne County, that contiguous area there.

I know that when an attorney and a family are trying to pick a bank and say, “Okay. Well, we have this person who had this catastrophic injury and they’re going to need to be taken care of for the rest of their life, and we need to decide who do we trust, who is going to be in this with us for the long haul?” I think that that decision is extraordinarily important decision because if someone has a life expectancy of another 20 or 30 years or even longer, you’re going to be working with this financial institution for that entire time.

So, picking a bank like First Bank Richmond, a bank that’s active in the community, a bank that has been around, that’s going to still be there in the future is extraordinarily important. Like you said, your bank’s like over a hundred years old.

Alan Spears:

Right.

David Craig – Host:

Tell us a little bit about that. I mean, so when a family is looking at a financial institution, trying to decide which trust department I should be working with, what are some of the things that they should look for?

Alan Spears:

Sure. Well, I would say the first thing is that looking at a bank to serve as the guardian is critically important. As you know, being the guardian of the estate, the person’s assets are a tremendous responsibility to take on. You’ve got to gather those assets, you’ve got to prepare an inventory, you’ve got to make decisions about what might happen to those assets. There may be real estate involved, cars, bank accounts, IRAs, a number of assets.

For the average person that can be a bit overwhelming to try to get their arms around that and to manage those things, but in addition to that, oftentimes there can be tensions in a family between who gets selected to be the guardian. When you select a bank to serve as guardian, you remove a lot of those family tensions that you and I both seen in our careers where maybe there’s two or three siblings and one of them gets named to be dad’s guardian and the other two are angry because they thought it should have been them.

There may also be distrust between siblings. So, when you have a corporate guardian, you remove a lot of those personal elements that can make it challenging. The other reason I think it’s important to have a corporate guardian, particularly in the type of clients that you work with, is, in many respects, it’s not unlike winning the lottery. Now, it’s not the kind of lottery you want to win because usually it’s some traumatic life event that has occurred that’s causing you to have this windfall of money.

But much like a lottery, when people get a windfall, they’re often overwhelmed with it, and in your case, with many of the clients you have, they’re no longer physically or mentally capable of making those kinds of decisions as to what to do with the money they’ve been awarded from the traumatic accident that they’ve been through. That’s when coming to a corporate guardian makes a lot of sense for the family because, again, many people are simply not equipped with the skills and the experience and the knowledge to manage the affairs, the business affairs, of the protected person.

So, when you’re looking for a trust department, I think you want to have one that has some sort of geographic proximity to the protected person so that they have more of an investment in it. When they’re close, they can check in on the person, they may be familiar with the facility the person is staying at, they may know the people who are providing care. I think the further away you get physically from the protected person, the less invested you might be in their care.

That is important even when you’re not the guardian of the person, you want to keep that individual’s care in mind in terms of caring for their money and their assets. So, that’s one thing. The other is the stability of the organization. As I mentioned, our bank has been here over a hundred years. We’re independent. We intend to stay independent.

So, you have confidence that that institution will be there because as you noted, oftentimes you’re looking at 20, 30, 40, 50 years of care that this person may need. You have clients I’m sure that are in their twenties who have had traumatic accidents, and 50 years from now you hope someone’s still there to be managing their affairs. I think it’s also good to use a community bank because we’re able to make decisions locally.

We don’t have to go to another city to get permission to take action or to make plans for the individual. Again, when you’re local, you have access, the family has access to you as well. So, it’s much easier for the family to come in. They can talk directly to the trust officers that are managing their family members’ financial affairs. They don’t have to call an 800 number to, and hope they get somebody on the line that knows why they’re calling.

So again, you can build that trust with the family because they can have that regular interaction with you as opposed to when you have a person in Richmond, but the bank that’s taking care of their assets is in Cincinnati or Chicago. Well, a family may hardly ever get to talk to them except occasionally on the phone.

I think those are some of the reasons that you would look at a community bank. You also, when you’re looking for a guardian, you want to have, of the person and the assets, in particular, you want to have someone that knows what they’re doing when it comes to investing money and protecting those investments and investing them appropriately.

You also would like to have a corporate guardian because they have the experience and expertise to do court reporting, the taxes and things of that nature that are required to be done for the protected person. So, those are some of the reasons I would look to going to a local bank and having a bank in general serve as the guardian of the estate.

David Craig – Host:

For those listeners out there who have never heard this and maybe have somebody in their family who’s been in a catastrophic accident, and they can’t take care of themselves, there’s typically two types of guardians. There’s the guardian of the person. In that, the company or individual or individuals, they make sure that the person, that the physical body, the physical person is taken care of, that they are housed, that they’re fed, that they get their medicine, that they are given therapies and whatever else is necessary, taken shopping, taken to the family and whatever else is necessary or the person’s capable of doing, they make sure that the person is well taken care of physically and from a health standpoint.

Then, there’s the guardian of the assets, and typically, these are not the same. So, then you have the guardian of the assets, which is in charge of the finances. They work with the guardian of the person, and they pay the bills and they, like Alan said, hopefully they check in with them and see how the person is doing, work with them hand in hand to make sure that the person is, the ward, or the person who’s injured, is taken care of and has all their financial needs met.

I’ve had these cases, I’ve been doing this for over 35 years now, and I’ve had banks call me personally and say, “Hey, this person wants this, or this person needs that,” and as a team, you put them in touch with the guardian of the person and the guardian of the assets. They get together, and they figure out what is in the best interest of this injured party. It’s a lot of work, and it’s not something that just happens.

I don’t, as a lawyer, I don’t automatically just get to assign somebody as the guardian of the person or the guardian of the assets. It’s something the family comes together about, and they work with their lawyer. Their lawyer will probably make recommendations, but then that has to be approved by the court. The court actually supervises this. It’s not unsupervised.

I mean, the court will, Alan has referred a couple times now to paperwork that has to be filed with the court. The court oversees this to make sure that it’s being taken care of. So, it’s not an easy job and there’s a lot of paperwork, there’s a lot of documentation, which there should be because we’re trying to protect those funds. Sometimes the court will also, there’s another type of guardian, sometimes a court will have, they’ll be trying to struggle with, “What kind of guardians do we need?”

So, they’ll appoint a guardian ad litem, and a guardian ad litem will check in and look at the whole situation and make a recommendation to the court as to who should be the guardian of the assets and who should be the guardian of the person or whether guardianships are necessary.

That’s the other type of guardian, and sometimes that guardian ad litem is put in place early so that they can give the court some feedback as to who should be involved. As Alan said, sometimes family members don’t always agree. When a catastrophic event happens, it doesn’t always bring out the best in everybody. It’s a tough time. It’s emotionally tough. People are distraught.

You need those objective individuals that can take care of the person and take care of the money. So, let’s talk a little bit specifically, and hopefully that helps the audience understand what we’re talking about. So, it’s a court appointed, and Alan is one of those people who can help take care of the finances. Alan, once the court appoints somebody like yourself or your bank, explain what that process is like, what is involved.

Alan Spears:

Sure. Let’s assume that we’re just going to get cash, that there’s been a lawsuit, the trial has happened, the settlement has been agreed to, and damages are paid, and you tell us, “Hey, we’re going to give you guys five million dollars to manage for this individual.” Now, since it’s a guardianship, we are acting in a fiduciary capacity, meaning that we have to act in the best interest of that individual, that protected person.

So, we’re going to assess the situation, consult with the family, consult with the attorney, determine what are the needs of this person from a financial standpoint. Perhaps all their care is going to be provided through insurance or federal or state programs, and the five million dollars that we have is just to be managed for future needs and occasional spending that might help supplement whatever’s coming from state and federal authorities.

Our first goal is to protect those assets, we don’t do anything risky in terms of investing them. So, we’re not going to run out and put them in cryptocurrency or speculative stocks and hedge funds and all of that. It’s really to protect that wealth because again, in many cases we’re looking 20, 30, 40 years out. So, after that consultation with the family, the attorney, and any other advisors that might need to be involved, we’ll set up an investment strategy that meets the goals that we’ve agreed upon.

Typically, it’s going to be something fairly conservative because again, we’re not putting this money at risk. So, it may be things like treasury notes, FDIC insured CDs, money market funds, maybe a little bit of exposure to the stock market, but in many cases, not because we’re not trying to take the five million necessarily and turn it into 15 million, and we don’t want to turn the five million into one million. So, we would have a conservative asset allocation that would be appropriate for that person’s circumstances.

Then, of course, we would do our accountings to the court so the court would see how those investments are performing and that they are appropriate for that individual to meet their current needs and anticipating what their needs might be in the future. Ultimately, we would have those decisions to make because we, as the guardian of the estate, would take responsibility for how those funds are invested with input from the family, but ultimately, we would make those decisions.

David Craig – Host:

I think that the family works hand in hand, but the thing to remember, again, unfortunately in these catastrophic cases, so I had a case where a wife, a mother of little kids had a serious brain injury and she was in a coma for months, had part of her skull removed. They eventually were able to put it back on, but her brain was, she lost part of her brain, and so she never was the same. She was never going to be able to take care of herself.

She was never going to be able to go home. She went home for a short period of time and her family just couldn’t take care of her. Unfortunately, her memory stopped on the day of the wreck. So, as her husband changed over the years, as her kids changed and grew up, she didn’t recognize them. She knew she had a husband, she knew she had kids, but she didn’t know why they didn’t come to see her anymore because they looked different.

Her memory of them was set in stone. So, when you have a situation like that, you have her side of the family worried about, “Well, what’s going to happen?” She was young, “What’s going to happen 30 years from now? Is the husband still going to be in the picture or not? Are the kids, as they get older and they go off to college, what’s going to happen?” There were strong feelings between two different sides of the family. My job was to look out for her interest.

In that case, we had a guardian ad litem appointed and the guardian ad litem helped the court decide what was necessary. Could one family member really on either side be trusted with this grave responsibility? The court decided, no, we need to have a bank involved and be the guardian of the assets, which is what we wanted as the attorney. The family ultimately could agree to that because not one side was the one calling the shots.

Then, when we tried that case, we went to a jury trial out of Missouri and the bank officer, trust officer actually came to the jury trial, and I introduced him to the jury so the jury would know that it wasn’t the husband who was going to be given all, the life care plan in that case was over 30 million. So, we didn’t want the jury thinking, well guys, is this husband going to stay with her? Is this husband going to blow the money? How’s he going to know what to do with it? We wanted the jury to understand and introduce the bank officer so that they knew that this would be taken care of. So, that’s an example of times when maybe the family doesn’t all agree, but usually in every case I’ve worked on, we can eventually get to an agreement on a bank because they can look at it and say, “Okay, they’re objective, they have one job to preserve those assets, and they will do that to the best of their ability in working with the family.”

I know you and I are working on one where the person has a brain injury and will never, probably ever be able to go live independently, live with his family. He’ll be taken care of for the rest of his life, and you have to work with that. So, we have a guardian of the person that’s an institution, guardian of the asset, which is your bank.

Alan Spears:

Yes.

David Craig – Host:

And you have to work with that institution. One of the other challenges is there’s government benefits and sometimes you have to be very careful not to jeopardize, if you don’t have a lot of money, not to jeopardize those government benefits. I assume the trust department has to look at all that, what governmental benefits, is there a special needs trust needed? I mean, how do we deal with this?

Alan Spears:

Yes, you’re right, because many of those programs, if you have certain income limits or asset limits that can count against you. For example, with Medicaid, it’s fairly common. You have special trusts you can set up for Medicaid. You can set up special needs trust in the sorts of circumstances you and I are speaking about.

So, you do have to be cognizant of that, that you do not want to disqualify the person for the benefits that they may be receiving from state or federal authorities such as VA benefits, Medicaid benefits, Medicare. You have to always factor that into your thinking when you’re strategizing about the investment plan.

David Craig – Host:

So, the bank gets appointed, and the bank is actually responsible for paying bills and then filing stuff with the court. Talk a little bit about that.

Alan Spears:

Yeah. So, part of working with the guardian of the person is to determine what bills need to be paid. If it’s a situation where they’re self-pay, then we coordinate with the facility that they’re staying at and with the guardian of the person to make sure their bills get paid in a timely manner. We usually have them set up where they’ll just come directly to us so there’s no delay in receiving those bills. As you know, there’s degrees of incapacity.

So, you may have someone incapacitated severely who has little or no outside interaction. You may have others who are deemed incapacitated, but they still have the ability to get on a cell phone and call family or friends. They still have the ability to leave the facility they’re staying at and go into the community and enjoy some of the things out in the community. Part of our role would be to supply funds if they want a phone or a TV in the room or cable TV or computer, money if they want to go out into the community to go out to eat. So, we would work with the guardian of the person to set that up.

You mentioned the accounting that has to be done. Again, this is another reason why you’d prefer to have a corporate guardian as opposed to an individual because you have to file an accounting with the court to account for every expenditure that you’ve made in the guardianship, to account for all the receipts, interest, dividend, other sources of income that you’ve had, and to ask for your fee. That’s one thing we hadn’t touched on is there is a fee involved for the work that we do as the guardian, but all of that is court supervised and court approved.

David Craig – Host:

Let’s talk a little bit about the fee. So, a trust department like yourself and the banks charge a fee for this type of work. Can you give the audience just a general guidance on how is that determined? Is it a percentage, is it an hourly? How does the bank charge?

Alan Spears:

Well, we charge a fee based on the market value of the assets. It starts at 1% and goes down from there as the size of the assets grows, but just as a general number, we’ll just say 1%. That fee covers our work that we do on behalf of the guardian, it covers the investment services that we provide, it covers the time we spend talking with attorneys, accountants, family members, caregivers. In addition to that, it provides the fee to pay the salaries and keeps the lights on here in the trust department.

So, we find the fee to be a reasonable fee, and by tying it to the market value, if we’re doing a good job and the assets are growing, our fee will go up. If the assets are going down in value, our fee will go down in value. Certainly, by doing that report to the court, if the court notices that, “Hey, the last two or three years you’ve come in here, the guardianship has been shrinking, what’s going on?” That’s part of the accountability we would have as the corporate trustee.

David Craig – Host:

Like you said, it’s all different stages. I mean, some people can go home to their family, and family can take care of them. Some people can, we can, if we’re successful, we can get them their own facility, their own house and have caretakers brought in to take care of them, and sometimes we can put that right next to a family member’s house if we can. There’s a lot of different options.

Sometimes people are put into a facility because they need so much medical care and so much treatment at the end, but even in some of those, we’ve been able to have transportation arranged. So those family members, or some of them are able to leave the facility. A lot of times for holidays and birthdays and special occasions, the asset, the banks can approve, let’s take a vehicle to the facility and take them and transport them to family members.

There’s a whole bunch of different things and different levels that I’ve seen over the years. Then, obviously the more money a person has that a jury hopefully awards them, the more options they have available to them. I think that’s extraordinarily important, so that a bank can’t do, they can do so much to protect the assets, but they’re limited to the assets.

In my cases, catastrophic injury cases, the person may have some assets, but typically most of the assets are coming from the jury award, and the bank can only do what they can do with what they have. So, that’s why it’s important to pick the right lawyer to try to get the right amount of assets so that the bank can make life easier for these folks that are catastrophically injured.

Alan Spears:

Well, and you spoke about the care plan and how when you have some of your clients who are looking at 20, 30, 40 years of care, it runs into the millions and millions of dollars. I think you’ve mentioned one that was as high as 30 million.

David Craig – Host:

Yep.

Alan Spears:

Is that correct?

David Craig – Host:

Yep. Yep.

Alan Spears:

So, there is a need to have those assets grow some to preserve their purchasing power. Again, you would not be aggressive and risky with them, but you do want to have some growth in there because we all know over time, inflation and rising costs will erode the purchasing power of the dollar.

What might sound like a large amount in 2023 isn’t so big in 2043 or 2053. As the person ages and the cost of care goes up, the dollar’s not going to go as far. You don’t want to be in a situation where perhaps the level of care has to be reduced because they can no longer afford to be in whatever facility they’re currently in.

David Craig – Host:

If someone hires my law firm to handle one of these types of cases, they know that I’m going to be involved. I’m not a hundred lawyer firm, I’m a smaller firm, 10 lawyers or so, and we’re growing, but I don’t want to be a hundred lawyer firm, and I want to be personally involved in my cases. I’ve worked with all different size banks, and I can tell you sometimes size is not a benefit.

I’ve worked with banks that the families have gotten very upset with because they cannot get through, they don’t communicate, they’re dealing with a lower-level employee that may turn over quite a few times during the pendency of the estate, and it’s very frustrating. So, in your bank, tell me a little bit, are you involved in all the cases? Do you have your fingers on them at all times or do you have a big trust department that has hundreds of people?

Alan Spears:

No, we don’t have hundreds of people, but our bank has over 200 employees, but in the trust department, there’s six of us. So, we all are very much aware of all the accounts. People are assigned certain accounts as their accounts, but we all have knowledge of them. We keep a database with a summary of every account. So, if it was my account and I was on vacation, the staff can go in that database and see, “Oh, what’s this about?”

If a call were to come in, if you were to call and say, “Hey, I have a question about whoever,” then you can go to that database, and they could respond to you. You wouldn’t have to wait, “Oh, well, he’s gone. He’ll be back next week. He’ll talk to you then.” That’s sort of the touch that we’re able to offer that you wouldn’t necessarily get at the bigger bank when they may not have that personal touch with all the accounts.

We have regular staff meetings where we’ll talk about the accounts and what’s going on with them. So, there is specific knowledge if it’s your account, however, there’s the broad knowledge about the accounts that the whole team has some degree of understanding about what’s going on, so we’re better able to serve our customers.

David Craig – Host:

Yeah, and I think that’s extraordinarily important. From a guy who’s done it and dealt with all different size banks, I do believe that if you’re listening to this and you’ve got a lawyer and the lawyer is recommending getting a guardian of the assets, as a client, you have the right to be actively involved in that process.

One of the benefits or one of the reasons I do this podcast is I don’t expect you all to be my clients, but I do want to inform you because information is power, and you do have the right to talk to your lawyer about what bank, and if you live in a smaller community like Richmond. I mean, Richmond is what 75,000 people maybe, somewhere around there.

Alan Spears:

Try about 40,000.

David Craig – Host:

Really? Okay.

Alan Spears:

Yeah.

David Craig – Host:

40,000 people. Is Wayne County 75,000?

Alan Spears:

The county is probably about that.

David Craig – Host:

Okay, that’s probably what I was thinking of. So, you live in a community like that and your son, your daughter, your wife, your husband, whoever it is that has this injury is going to be in a facility in that community, then I would encourage you to look local, look at the trust department, ask the attorney, say, “Could you set up a meeting where I could talk to the trust department,” because you’re going to be dealing with these folks for years to come. The lawyer is going to be less involved in your case once the case is done. I still take my clients’ calls and I still get calls from clients and trust departments and all those, and I take those, but some lawyers don’t. So, you are going to be dealing with the guardian of the person, you are going to be dealing with the guardian of your assets, of the award’s assets.

So, ask questions. How active is the bank in my community? Do they participate in my community? Is that a good thing? Are they small enough, yet big enough to handle my money? Have they been here for a long time? Are they trustworthy? Do I think that they are good people?

Then ask your lawyer, because some lawyers aren’t in the smaller communities, especially in the area that I do, they may not even be from the state. So, you want to not just let them pick without being involved. So, ask the questions, participate. No good lawyer is going to be offended by you asking those questions or you wanting to be involved.

Alan Spears:

Yes. I think one of the things you touched on there; it’s important when the families evaluate the stability of that institution. Do they have confidence that they’ll be here in five years or 25 years? We’ve seen over the last 25 or 30 years, that’s not the case in a lot of communities. Many of the banks have merged or closed or been bought out.

So, the level of service that people might have been used to goes away. And that’s one thing we can say about our bank is we’re committed here for the long term. So, folks that come to see us can have some sense of reliability and confidence that First Bank will be here in some form or fashion for the long haul.

David Craig – Host:

Well, Alan, thank you so much. Is there anything else that you can think of that folks should know when considering the guardian of the assets, or what the guardian of the assets role is, that we haven’t talked about or haven’t touched on?

Alan Spears:

I think the key thing that you mentioned is to go talk to the bank and assess them and see what your comfort level is. Is this a bank that we can trust to take care of our loved one, and that will answer a lot of the questions because they’re going to have a lot of things going through their minds with what’s happened to their loved one, with the lawsuit, the trial.

You want to have a bank that you can turn to that you can trust, and that’s what I feel First Bank Richmond has to offer. So, I really appreciate this opportunity to come on the podcast. I hope a few people listen, and if anyone has any questions, feel free to reach out to me. I’d be happy to help them.

David Craig – Host:

Great. Well, thank you so much. I really appreciate it, and I agree wholeheartedly. The face-to-face meetings are the best way. I mean, whether you’re picking the bank to be guardian of the assets, whether you’re picking a facility to be guardian of the person, you as a family, you should be invested. You should go. Don’t be afraid to meet with them. Don’t be afraid to ask questions.

Even when it comes time to pick a lawyer, if you’re picking a lawyer, you should never be afraid to meet with them, talk to them, ask to talk to different lawyers. Any lawyer that tries to pressure you into making a decision without interviewing and talking to other lawyers is probably not the right lawyer. I think that you want somebody just like a bank, just like the person who’s taking care of your person, you want somebody who you trust, who you can get along with, who cares about you as an individual. So, with that, Alan-.

Alan Spears:

Sounds like you described yourself.

David Craig – Host:

Well, I mean, it’s one of the things we take pride of at Craig, Kelley & Faultless, is that we try to make a positive difference in the lives of our clients, the lives of our employees, and the lives of the folks in the community in which we practice. Alright, Alan. Well, thank you very much. You all have a good day. Take care.

Alan Spears:

Thank you. Bye-bye.

David Craig – Host:

This is David Craig, and you’ve been listening to After the Crash. If you’d like more information about me or my law firm, please go to our website, ckflaw.com, or if you’d like to talk to me, you can call 1-800-ASK-DAVID. If you would like a guide on what to do after a truck wreck, then pick up my book, Semitruck Wreck: A Guide for Victims and Their Families. This is available on Amazon, or you can download it for free on our website, ckflaw.com.