Brian Thomas Bradley

I am licensed in OR, CA, & WA.  I spent the first part of my career on the plaintiff's side of civil litigation in Los Angeles and Orange County. My job was to find the other side's money — pulling financial records in discovery, tracing ownership structures, taking depositions, and piercing entities people believed were protecting them.

That is why I do asset protection the way I do.

The structures that came apart came apart for the same two reasons every time. Either the debtor still controlled what he claimed to have given away, or he built the thing after the claim was already in view. Neither is fixable once a lawsuit is filed. Both are entirely avoidable before one.

I now build pre-litigation asset protection structures for physicians, real estate investors, business owners, and families with meaningful exposure — people whose wealth sits above their insurance limits and outside anything a state exemption covers.

My practice runs on four questions I apply to every plan, including plans other attorneys built. Timing: was this in place before the claim was foreseeable? Control: on the worst day of your financial life, who can a judge order to move your assets? Jurisdiction: whose law governs when a creditor actually tries to collect? Collectibility: does the structure change what a rational creditor believes it can recover?

That last one is where cases actually resolve. Getting a judgment and collecting a judgment are different economic events, and the gap between them is where planning does its work.

The tools are layered — state-matched LLCs to contain liability at the asset level, a limited partnership above them to separate ownership from management, and an irrevocable trust structure above that to separate ownership from control. Which layers a client needs depends on their exposure, not their net worth. A surgeon with $800,000 exposed and an investor with $3 million in index funds face different problems.

I am also the author of the Over Exposed series, and I write regularly on asset protection law, creditor remedies, and the case law that shows what actually holds up.

I do not manage money, prepare tax returns, or draft estate plans. I build the legal architecture underneath all three, and I coordinate with the CPA, wealth manager, and estate attorney a client already has.

No structure makes anyone judgment-proof, and no attorney can promise a courtroom outcome. What a properly built and properly timed structure changes is the position you negotiate from.