An inheritance question that's a bit complicated.

[YY1]

I learned first hand when I was in law school that many of my colleagues were crooks or fools. About 20% were true pros, who took pride in what they did. Problem is, it's hard to tell the difference, and a law firm may have a mixture of all of them. I've been better equipped than most to spot the differences, and as I mentioned in my earlier post, I still got burned.

Unfortunately, the problem is not unique to the legal profession. During my school days, a medical student who lived above me in married student housing told me the exact same thing was going on in his neck of the woods. I fired my last primary care doctor, after he failed to make the connection between a low hemoglobin count, and an aspirin regimen to reduce heart attack risk. When I raised the issue, I was told, "the algorithm indicates the aspirin use until age 70. You need to see a specialist."

I had no cardiac risk factors other than age, so I quit the aspirin, discussed the issue with a new doctor, retested, and and came up normal. You need to be an informed consumer.

I agree there.

I went through three doctors before I found one that would actually listen to me and also admit that my rare but growing type of diabetes was not too well understood by the medical community.
(Basically late onset type I, which will usually start a denial argument with most people and doctors)

It's almost the same scenario, I'm doing 80% of the "work" and he's suggesting things and making it legit, and writing the prescriptions.

I even suggested what specific medications I thought i needed and in what dosages. His response was "OK, let's try that" and wrote it up.

 

[68BabyBlue]

Now that I've taken shots at both the legal and medical professions, I'd like to show a few examples of traits which the effective folks I've dealt with shared. My attorney was a social worker before she practiced law. She has a keen appreciation of how family dynamics play into estate planning issues, in addition to her top flight legal acumen. She owns multiple businesses in addition to her law practice. Her practical experience with tax issues in a business setting enhances her legal advice. She is a former litigator, and was able to help my wife secure unemployment compensation after she took a buy out from her last employer, with minimal costs for a successful outcome.

On the medical side, I deal with some nuisance post-polio issues. Folks old enough to have had the disease have either passed on, or are now old enough that the results can be dismissed as old age. I met a long retired occupational therapist at Carlisle last summer, who had dealt with many survivors back in the day, and had used mobility aids herself since age 16. She did a work up on me, and assured me that my choice of physical activity and mobility tools was well thought out, better than anything I would have gotten from the medical profession. She had a masters degree in recreational rehabilitation, but during her training, had never been introduced to the tools we were both using.

Practical intelligence in combination with academic certifications is valuable, but often hard to find.