Michael Worth Brown

When my widowed sister-in-law asked my advice on how to preserve her estate (her home) from Cal-med recovery to pass on to her two adult children, I referred her to Mr Brown who had prepared a living trust for me and my wife 22 years previously, at least in part due to his noteworthy practice of meet...ing with clients in their home. Subsequently he met with my SIL and me at my home, culminating in her retaining him to prepare an irrevocable living trust to satisfy her objective, for which I prepaid his very reasonable fixed fee. So far, so good. Unfortunately, upon review of his initial draft trust, there were 40-50 points of questions or disagreements regarding trust verbiage which we attempted to resolve sporadically over the next three months by iterative email discussions of each point. Long story short, although after finally down to all but a half a dozen points left to be resolved, I received an unannounced email from Mr Brown indicating he could "in good conscience" no longer continue the effort and was returning the entire prepaid fee. He subsequently refused to relent or even discuss his shocking and totally unexpected decision despite my appeals that he reconsider, nor did he comply with the Calif Bar's ethical conduct rules for dropping a client by failing to even make any recommendations or referral for another attorney to pick up where he arbitrarily left us off and hanging. Despite having myself invested in several hundred hours of uncompensated personal research during these continuing reviews regarding related legal terminology and relevant law issues related to Mr Brown's draft proposal, I decided against filing an "abandonment of client" complaint with the CA Bar as probably being unproductive. However, this opportunity I happened upon during a subsequent attorney search for myself on another personal matter seemed an appropriate place to at least present my story for possible consideration by anyone else reviewing Mr Brown's review.