Category: Probate Court

GUARDIANS FOR PROFIT ‘Ruling Over Someone’ Has Paid Off Handsomely Frumeh Labow buzzes through the double doors of Los Angeles County’s main Probate Court, a queen bee in her hive. She has several items to settle. She asks a judge for permission to sell the Beverly Hills home of a 66-year-old man with Parkinson’s disease, though he wants to keep it. She asks the judge to order the release of financial records by the girlfriend of another aged client. She asks the court to approve $25,140 in fees, to be paid from the bank account of a third elderly ward. The judge gives her everything she wants. “I’m happy,” she says, making her way back through the double doors. “I got paid today.” Labow, 58, is among the most successful professional conservators in Southern California. She filed 158 cases between 1997 and 2003, 50% more than her closest competitor. Her firm, Complete Probate Administration Inc., controls $60 million of other people’s money. After her court hearing, Labow hops into her baby-blue Jaguar and heads for the house of a new client, an octogenarian with dementia and a million-dollar estate. Born in Chicago and named Frumeh to incorporate the Yiddish word for “pious,” Labow grew up in L.A.’s Cheviot Hills and went to UC Berkeley. She spent 13 years at the county agency that handles conservatorships for the incapacitated and the mentally ill, then followed a conga line of colleagues into the private sector. In Complete Probate, Labow has built what one attorney called a “private fiduciary estate factory.” She employs three full-time case managers. She has a controller, a paralegal and clerks who do everything from reconciling clients’ bank statements to planning their funerals. She herself spends much of her… Read More

But nothing changed LA Times exposed los angeles county probate department but nothing changed By Robin Fields, Evelyn Larrubia and Jack Leonard Nov. 13, 2005 12 AM PT Times Staff Writers Helen Jones sits in a wheelchair, surrounded by strangers who control her life. She is not allowed to answer the telephone. Her mail is screened. She cannot spend her own money. A child of the Depression, Jones, 87, worked hard for decades, driving rivets into World War II fighter planes, making neckties, threading bristles into nail-polish brushes. She saved obsessively, putting away $560,000 for her old age. Her life changed three years ago, when a woman named Melodie Scott told a court in San Bernardino that Jones was unable to manage for herself. Without asking Jones, a judge made Scott — someone she had never met — her legal guardian. Scott is a professional conservator. It was her responsibility to protect Jones and conserve her nest egg. So far, Scott has spent at least $200,000 of it. The money has gone to pay Scott’s fees, fill Jones’ house with new appliances she did not want and hire attendants to supervise her around the clock, among other expenses. Once Jones grasped what was happening, she found a lawyer and tried, unsuccessfully, to end Scott’s hold on her. “I don’t want to be a burden to anyone,” she told a judge, almost apologetically. “I just wanted to be on my own.” Jones’ world has narrowed. She used to call Dial-A-Ride and go to the market, or sit in her driveway chatting with neighbors. Now she spends her days watching television in her living room in Yucaipa, amid pots of yellow plastic flowers and lamps with no shades. The caretakers rarely take… Read More