Penner & Purves
Estate Planning, Family Law, Trust Administration, and Probate in Santa Barbara County
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providing Quality legal service FOR 46 YEARS

Santa Barbara Firm - Estate Planning, Family Law, Probate, and Trust Administration

 

Experienced and Friendly Law Firm Dedicated to Serving You and Your Family in Santa Barbara, San Luis Obispo, and Ventura Counties

Focused on Getting Results

When you are facing a complicated or disputed legal matter, you need guidance and support from experienced attorneys who not only understand the law, but also understand the many human dynamics, need for compassion, court procedures and processes, and dispute resolution skills to find a solution.

At Penner & Purves, PC, our legal team provides cost-effective, comprehensive representation across a range of legal matters, specializing in Estate Planning, Trust Administration, Family Law, Divorce, Child Custody, Adoption, Probate, Real Estate Law, Wills and Trusts, and Civil Litigation. We tailor our legal representation to each client's specific needs while remaining conscious of legal costs. With more than 46 years of experience, we have the necessary skills and resources to help you achieve your legal goals.

Underlying our entire law practice is the principle that there are times to be aggressive and to fight, but there are also times to approach an escalating legal dispute with the resolve to prioritize, preserve, and value relationships. This means that many legal matters need to be handled in a way that keeps people out of the courts and enables them to preserve their relationships. Other legal matters need to be taken to trial as soon as possible.

Personal Client Service

We care about our clients and take steps to ensure personal client service to help reduce the emotional stress associated with the legal system. We devote substantial time, energy and resources to our clients in order to better understand their short and long-term goals. Our in-depth client service includes detailing your available options as well as possible consequences so you can make informed decisions throughout the course of your legal matter or case.

At Penner & Purves, there is always a friendly voice on other side of the phone. We provide open and direct client communication via in-person, phone, and virtual consultations. If you have an emergency, we will respond within 24 hours.

Get in touch with us to set up a FREE consultation by calling (805) 965-0085, or use the contact form at the bottom of this page to inquire whether our services are right for you.

CORE VALUES

Our Law Office’s Core Values can be listed and summarized as follows:

  • Diligence ~ high work ethic that practices tireless commitment to serving clients with energy

  • Clarity ~ care and attention to precision in words and details; clear and correct English grammar

  • Empathy ~ practicing truly and sincerely feeling for clients’ griefs, fears, worries, and loves

  • Family ~ commitment to serving families as foundational to community and our common good

  • Virtue ~ cultivation of moral character matters rather than mere rule following or utilitarian calculus

  • Prudence ~ discerning the difference between the time to compromise and the time to fight

  • Reason ~ devotion to reason ― not will, money, or power ― as the grounds for law & legal outcomes

  • the Good ~ pursuit of the good of others as the end and purpose of our work in serving clients and the law

As a part of cultivating the above values, in an increasingly polarized and politicized age, we also pride ourselves on being able to cultivate friendships and to work across partisan divides. While the members of our law office have held widely divergent political views over the years, and while they still do, we believe that anyone who genuinely cares about the good of others should be able to listen and have civil and productive discourse with those of opposing viewpoints.

If Justices Antonin Scalia and Ruth Bader Ginsburg could be the best of friends, going to the opera together during their off-time, then any good lawyer should be able to maintain friendships with clients and professionals on both the left and the right. Indeed, this is an essential skill for any lawyer so that the lawyer can maintain amicable relations with judges of any political persuasion. It is by our practicing the ability to maintain amiability with those who hold to all opposing viewpoints that we believe long-run success in our local community, with clients from all walks of life and from all political persuasions, is possible.

 

Contact

CONTACT

Phone: (805) 965-0085
Fax: (805) 963-3156

sep@pennerandpurves.com
jpurves@pennerandpurves.com

➤ LOCATION

1215 De La Vina Street
Suite K
Santa Barbara, CA 93101

 

Areas of Practice

ESTATE PLANNING

Do you know beyond a shadow of a doubt what would happen legally and financially to you, your loved ones, your money, and everything you care about if something unexpected happened to you? Are you managing your finances and holding your assets in such a way as to protect yourself and your family from adverse tax consequences? We are pleased to announce that we now offer estate planning with a Personal Family Lawyer®, providing clients with an array of options (including the Kids Protection Plan™ for those with children) specifically tailored and designed to preserve and build each kind of wealth, both tangible and intangible. It is our privilege to offer our clients relational estate planning counseling, rather than copy-and-paste one-off transactional documents that would be unlikely to work for your family when the time comes that they are needed.

divorce, lEGAL SEPARATION, spousal support

Do you understand all the financial, relational, and health consequences of a divorce? Have you seen what happens to couples in divorce proceedings where it is the goal of the divorce attorney to sue the other spouse for all that they are worth? If these are issues you care about, if you want to maintain a position of reasonableness, and if you value the preservation of relationships and friendships, then know that our 45+ years of experience has been devoted to this approach and philosophy. No couple’s finances should be entirely eaten away by attorneys fees due to divorce. No divorce should be fought as a scorched-earth campaign against another person. If divorce has to come, it can be done with kindness, reasonableness, generosity, integrity, and economy. If you are faced with the prospect of divorce, we will help you do the right thing in any way that we can.

child custody & support

If we represent and assist you as a parent to resolve legal proceedings affecting your children, we will make the following three commitments: (1) to place the best interests, security, care, and support of your children as the top priority above all else; (2) to de-escalate conflict, and to resolve potential disputes as swiftly and amicably as possible in order to preserve the civility that parents need to work together for the good of their children; and (3) to aggressively obtain the support and resources needed should the necessity arise, while also maintaining a realistic view towards the finances of any single household that must now bear the burden of supporting two households. Too many children are subjected to stressful and acrimonious court proceedings. These issues should be resolved without causing additional harm or damage.

 

TrustS: Administration & Litigation

Trust administration in accordance with California law is a highly specialized field involving numerous fiduciary duties, requirements, and responsibilities. If you are a Trustee, not only should you be working with comprehensive checklists and have a firm grasp on your responsibilities, but you also fill a truly important position of trust for someone who believed in you. Practiced with care, you have the capacity to cultivate a life-giving and life-affirming relationship with the Trust’s beneficiaries as a way of honoring the person who appointed you. Under the terms of most trusts, a Trustee is entitled to retain the services of legal counsel. Because we have extensive experience representing trustees and assisting them in navigating the requirements of California law, we design our trust administration process both in order to minimize a Trust’s attorneys fees and to maximize the Trustee’s quality of service as a fiduciary.

PROBATE

The loss of a close family member or friend is a difficult time, and the settling of an estate in probate can be overwhelming. Not only that, but the California probate process takes far too long (ranging from 12 to 18 months). If you work with us and follow our system, we will assist you in completing the probate process as quickly as the law and the courts will allow, approximately 9-10 months. After 45+ years of experience in assisting Executors and Administrators administer probate estates, we have found that a majority of contested probates results directly from poor communication between Executors, their attorneys, and Heirs. Thus, we maximize the probability of conducting a conflict-free probate process by maintaining a policy of transparency and open communication with all heirs to a probate estate. A well conducted probate then becomes a matter of good stewardship and attention to detail, skills we employ with great care.

BUSINESS LAW & FORMATION

Knowledge of the fundamentals of business is still the key to success, and business owners of every size need sound legal advice to protect their interests. If you are just starting out, then you will need to decide what kind of legal business entity to create in order to best serve your goals and your business plan. We can help advise you as you make the right choice. We are also experienced in creating the appropriate business formation documents for corporations, partnerships, limited liability companies, limited partnerships, and sole proprietorships, and we can draft these documents for you and give you guidance as to what needs to be filed where. If you are already in business, we are able to draft re-formation documents, client contracts, employment agreements, employment policies, or other legal documents you need in order to efficiently run and protect your business, avoiding unnecessary problems along the way.

 

CONSERVATORSHIPS & GUARDIANSHIPS

Do you have a loved one who is vulnerable or who lacks capacity to make his or her own medical or financial decisions? If so, sometimes it is possible for a family member or a friend to step in to protect and to care for a person in need who lacks capacity. If this is a situation that you have questions about, please feel free to call us. We understand that there are times when caring for someone you love involves making difficult decisions. It doesn’t make it any easier if your loved one has not set up an estate plan and/or a healthcare power of attorney with directions as to what to do in the event that they cannot care for themselves. When this is the case, there are legal remedies available in order for a person to be granted Court ordered powers to manage the financial or healthcare affairs of someone who needs that protection. Having obtained many conservatorships over the past years, we would be happy to help you and your family solve this problem if the applicable laws allow.

ELDER ABUSE LITIGATION

Every family has serious and legitimate concerns about the health, protection, rights, and privileges of elderly family members.  Declining health or diminished capacity can, if not carefully planned for, result in a loss of freedom and personal autonomy. As a result, elders are among the most vulnerable members of our community and are particularly susceptible to abuse. If you are concerned that an elderly person is being harmed or mistreated, do not hesitate to contact us for review of the situation. There are various legal remedies that you can pursue to protect your elderly grandparents, parents, siblings, or friends. There are legal principles, including legal capacity, undue influence, fraud, conflict of interest, and the like which California Courts will consider in order to protect those who are vulnerable. However, at the same time, if you can avoid the costs of going to court, then that will often be for the benefit of the person you are attempting to protect.

CIVIL LITIGATION

The Law Offices of Stephen E. Penner have over 40 years of extensive experience conducting civil litigation in Santa Barbara, Ventura, and San Luis Obispo Counties. Whether you need to file a lawsuit or defend against a lawsuit, there are a vast array of options, possible solutions, and procedural requirements under California Law. We will be happy to help you apply the law to your particular set of facts so that you can make an informed decision as to what to do inside or outside of court. In the context of civil lawsuits, our law firm specializes in helping our clients through three basic phases, should they be necessary. First, we will help you analyze how the law would apply to your circumstances, and which legal causes of action would be best to pursue. Second, we will help you pursue private alternative dispute resolution if doing so will save you time, stress, and money. Third, we will aggressively advocate for you in court and through a trial should doing so be the last practical and just course of action.

 

Recommended Books for Clients

“Where can private clients find great advisers? Look for contrarians, women and men who have chosen professional paths that are different and who know why they are on those paths. Seek people who describe themselves as ‘called’ to this work. Look for people who are greatly interested in other people, are curious about you, and who are creative in areas beyond their professional lives. Seek a person who might become your friend, your spouse’s friend, and your children’s friend.”

― James E. Hughes Jr., Family Wealth ― Keeping It in the Family ― How Family Members and Their Advisers Preserve Human, Intellectual, and Financial Assets for Generations, 2004, pg. 94

“To invest in the stock market, you have one of three choices.

  • Individual stocks

  • Actively managed mutual funds

  • Index funds

Which choice is best for you? A good way to begin answering that question is to keep in mind the words of John F. Kennedy, who once said: The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie ― deliberate, contrived, and dishonest, but the myth ― persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic.

― Bill Schultheis, The Coffeehouse Investor: How to Build Wealth, Ignore Wall Street, and Get On With Your Life, 1998, pgs. 118-119

“Estate planning is not a kitchen remodeling project. It’s not a repair to your Volkswagen. You’re going to be preparing documents that lawyers and loved ones are going to be looking at after you are dead and unable to clarify your wishes further. Your estate plan is a heavy responsibility. It deserves your utmost respect and the best advice you can find. Think about it like this: ‘I’m signing this document, and after I’m out of action, someone is really going to be looking at this in detail. It will outlive me, and every single word is going to matter.’”

― James L. Cunningham Jr., Savvy Estate Planning: What You Need to Know Before You Talk to the Right Lawyer, 2017, pgs. 49-50

“Although it’s important to make sure that you carefully and thoughtfully share financial information in age -appropriate ways, and although charitable giving is and should be an important part of any plan, the fundamental question is this: Why should you ultimately deploy your assets at Death in a way that you never would have while you were alive? In other words, why shouldn’t your estate plan and your dealings with your children, heirs, and society align with your goals, values, and beliefs? What if, instead of dumping, dividing, and dissipating assets, you focused on transferring wisdom and opportunity, and fostered self-reliance, sustainability, and productivity?”

― David R. York & Andrew L. Howell, Entrusted: Building a Legacy That Lasts, 2015, pg. 13

 
 
We will never forget all of the dedication and hard work Stephen E. Penner put in our case. Thank you.
— Wayne and debbie b.
 
 

 

How Can We Help You?

Use the form below to contact us regarding your legal inquiry. Please be as detailed as possible. To help us best service your inquiry, we recommend that you first describe the issue you’re having, before telling us what you want to achieve. You may also email or call us to make an appointment for a FREE phone evaluation.