Tomer T. Gutman

Tomer Gutman is certified by the State Bar of California Board of Legal Specialization as a specialist in estate planning, trust and probate law. Certification is not a membership and it is not an award. It means the State Bar tested his knowledge in this field, verified his experience handling these cases, and confirmed his standing with the profession.

His practice runs through Harbor Probate Law PC, a probate only firm in Solana Beach that handles decedents’ estates throughout California: full administration, summary and small estate procedures, intestate estates, real property sales, creditor claims and the final accounting the court has to approve before anyone inherits.

Most of what makes a probate expensive is not the law. It is an estate that was not valued properly, a house that sat too long, or a filing that came back with a defect nobody caught. A background in finance and an MBA in international management shape how he runs a file around exactly those risks.

Estate planning and real property are not competing practices here. They are the competencies that make the probate work good. Knowing how a plan was built is what tells you what the person intended, and real property is part of almost every estate. Where an estate holds a business interest, he handles that as well.

California sets probate attorney fees by statute, so the figure is neither negotiable nor a mystery, and it is paid out of estate funds at the end of the case rather than month to month. Work beyond the ordinary course of administration is charged as extraordinary services at an hourly rate the judge approves.

He is licensed in California, Florida, Nevada and Washington. The first conversation costs nothing, and sometimes the answer is that probate is not required at all.