Galier & Associates, PC

"Estate Planning with Your Pets in Mind" Due to COVID-19 "family members" can even extend to our favorite four-legged children or 'grand-pups.' More and more pets are becoming like family. And, more and more, I see posts on social media from folks trying to find homes for someone’s pets when they become critically ill or have died. With the Covis-19 pandemic, many of us are thinking about estate planning. So, when thinking about your estate plan, think about your pets too. ... This article will give you some insights on planning for care of your pets after you are gone. https://animallaw.foxrothschild.com//how-covid-19-has-got/

"Allegation of Fraud Usually Will Not Extend Your Time to Contest the Probate of a Will" I don’t have an article to review or comment on this month. Rather, I have a Montana Supreme Court case I recently read and want to compare with Oklahoma law. The Montana Supreme Court upheld the denial of a challenge to a probated will based on alleged fraud in the June 2020 case of Estate of Swanberg. The Court held that the alleged fraud did not extend the time limitation, and woul...Continue reading

Golden Doodle Eats What? Y’all might not know but could probably guess that I’m the youngest here in the office...only by a few years. A lot of friends and family are still unsure of what I do at our wonderful office, pertaining to Estate Planning and Probates. Well to start things off, wills and trusts are a large component of how our firm protects out clients’ assets and property even after their lifetime. This month’s newsletter I thought I would share a moment from the d...ays back when all we cared about was simply doing your homework and turning it in on time. And with that being said, I found this article to be more than timely because I only left college a little over a year ago. In this newspaper article, from San Antonio TX, describes my school-girl worst nightmare: using the ‘my dog ate my homework’ excuse. You could definitely say I was a Polly-Anna, scratch that, I am still probably a Polly-Anna. While I was reading, in my mind I thought, only someone who didn’t ever do their homework would be more likely to be using the dog ate my assignment excuse. I guess when it comes to legal challenges the excuse can be considered valid because the attorney, William E. Leighner, advised his clients to admit to the absence of the will. The defendants filed a pleading containing the statement: Decedent’s original Will was purloined from Leighner’s study by an unruly two-year-old Golden Doodle named Linus, who took said original Will through the doggy door, into the back yard and devoured it. Instead of confessing to the teacher like in school, it’s Judge Kazen of the Bexar County Courthouse. Now if we were back in school I would absolutely never have admitted to losing the assignment, I’d rather take the penalization silently than be professionally embarrassed. In this case it is regarding validity of intentions listed in said consumed-and-digested ‘original will’ approved by the decedent (deceased person of interest). Once a family elder passes and has real estate (property) that could be inherited court must uphold the intentions of the no-longer-living-person. In order to complete changes of ownership through a probate legal process must begin. Moral of the story: ask your attorney if they own a dog. Just kidding but if you would like to laugh some more, you can read the article for yourself at: https://www.expressnews.com//Dog-ate-the-will-case-headed-

COV-19 and the Long Term Care Facility Problem With lock downs starting to be opened up and people returning to a much more normal routine, a stark statistic is emerging. The death rate in nursing homes due to the virus is alarming. And, the question is becoming, ‘how much of the economy would we have needed to close if we had viewed long term care facilities separately from the general population and managed them properly?’. Of those states reporting, some attribute 60%, 70%, even 80% of their total COV-19 deaths to nursing homes. Oklahoma’s rate is nearly 50%. In a recent article in Forbes, Avik Roy explores the issue. If you would like to read the article it is available at https://www.forbes.com//nursing-homes-assisted-living-fa/. If you or someone you know is in need of a guardianship, call our office today!

Tiger King and Estate Planning One episode of the recent Netflix hit Tiger King focused on the disappearance of the husband of the protagonist's arch-enemy. Joe Exotic was sentenced to federal prison for animal abuse and his part in a murder-for-hire plot against Carole Baskin. However, Baskin appears as less than lily-white. It appears that her former husband, millionaire Don Lewis, disappeared in 1997 and Baskin filed for a court order to declare Lewis death "immediately" ...Continue reading