Asset Protection

• The United States is the only country in the world where litigation "on commission" is legal.
• More than two-thirds of the lawyers on the planet live in the United States.
• There are currently more than 100 million lawsuits in progress in the United States.
• 14 million new lawsuits are filed in the United States every year.

According to an article by Matt Blackman for Offshore Finance USA:

"In one recent survey conducted in the US, participants rated a lawsuit as the second best way to strike it rich behind winning a lottery and ahead of receiving an inheritance."

What is asset protection?

Asset protection is not hiding assets, defrauding creditors or evading taxes. It is the structuring of your assets "...to make them unattractive and legally unreachable by [potential] creditors, but available for financial goals and needs."

"Sound asset protection does not encourage nor necessitate illegal acts.... The law itself recognizes asset protection as exampled by numerous provisions defining permitted and prohibited strategies."
- www.ptlclub.com

The Problem

Charles Sykes states it best in his oh-so-politically-incorrect book, A Nation of Victims, which looks at the social implications of the decay of American character and responsibility.

"The National Anthem has become The Whine....

"Unfortunately, that is a formula for social gridlock: the irresistible search for someone or something to blame colliding with the unmovable unwillingness to accept responsibility. Now enshrined in law and jurisprudence, victimism is reshaping the fabric of society, including employment policies, criminal justice, education urban politics, and, in an increasingly Orwellian emphasis on 'sensitivity' in language. A community of interdependent citizens has been displaced by a society of resentful, competing and self-interested individuals who have dressed their private annoyances in the garb of victimism."

The Devil Made Me Do It

The litigation game has spread across our business culture like a prairie fire in August. It's not just doctors. Business owners and management personnel are confronted with such an assault of victimization that Legal and Human Resource departments have turned into realty zoos. On the other hand, it's not just the lawyers and the it's not my fault attitude of the employees that is driving the litigation explosion. The scary thing is that the courts are agreeing with them. Judges, it seems, are now engaged in post-graduate study of that great American thinker, Flip Wilson, who founded the New School of The Devil Made Me Do it.

Take the case of a guy we'll call Sam. It seems Sam had a hard time getting to work on time. Now all of us have probably been late to work more than once, but Sam made it a crusade. In fact, he was late to work virtually every day he was on the job. Sam's employer, fed up with his repeated lateness, finally sent him packing.

Sam, of course, did the natural... he sued. The grounds? Sam maintained that his chronic lateness was a disability. That's right, he had a disability that made him late to work every day. A psychiatrist,

"... testified that (Sam) was unable to show up on time for work because of what they called his 'neurotic compulsion for lateness', which was a 'behavioral aberration that is deeply rooted in his personality and almost certainly had its origins in conflictual interaction with his parents in early life.'"(9)
- Sykes p131

Conflictual interaction... I love that.

Now, consider the fact that the Pennsylvania Court of Common Pleas agreed with him citing the Pennsylvania Human Relations Act.

Yep. Trash your timecards. Chronic Lateness is a disability.

But Chronic Lateness does not hold a candle to Professor Aryeh Motzkin's affliction. The good Professor, who taught Philosophy at Boston University, was seriously challenged. He apparently had trouble keeping his hands of his female students and faculty members. A campus investigation found that he had sexually assaulted a junior faculty member and had sexually harassed a number of female students.

After the investigation exposed the prof's... eh... proclivities, the University gave him his walking papers. Undaunted, our hero responded with, that's right, a law suit. The University, he said, was discriminating against him due to his disability. You see Aryeh had depression and "...the medication he took for the depression diminished his capacity to keep his hands of female students and colleagues."

Disability chic - this one may attract a following.

Motzkin insisted that he couldn't control his impulses and argued that it was the University's job to help him deal with his problem.

Apparently the judge didn't have a problem with his disability either. He dismissed Motzkin's lawsuit against the University, but not because of the disability claim itself, he dismissed it because of the applicability of the law to that particular case.

One Hundred Million Lawsuits

Lawsuits by the diseased, dysfunctional and responsibly-challenged have become an everyday part of America life today. The removal of responsibility from the concept of justice has degraded our entire legal system and turned our courts into forums for the conduct of legal blackmail. No one with assets is immune; certainly not if they are in business. The skyrocketing increase in employee lawsuits is nothing short of shocking. In a recent four-year period the number of sex, race, disability, and age discrimination lawsuits more than doubled. Professionals, corporate officers and directors and property owners are also high profile targets these days.

According to one website, lawsuits by clients, patients, tenants, shareholders, employees, spouses, and customers are increasing seven times faster than the population and our courts are currently choked with 100 million existing lawsuits.

The law is supposed to be about the administration of justice. Justice presupposes some sense of truth, rationality and reason. But these concepts are so far removed from our current legal system that, with a few exceptions, they are completely unrecognizable in civil or criminal courts today.

No, today the law is about The Buck. Show me an individual or organization with assets or insurance and I'll show you a defendant waiting to happen. A case in point is reported about a law suit in Puerto Rico:

"When disgruntled unionists torched the DuPont Plaza hotel in Puerto Rico, lawyers for fire victims sued not the individual arsonists (who didn't have deep pockets, after all) but hundreds of companies that made flammable items on the scene, from wallpaper to bar stools to carpeting, they even sued the company that made the slot machines in the hotel casino. These target companies, faced with having to pay joint shares of a defense effort running to tens of millions of dollars, had to buy their way out of the suit for sums ranging from $250,000 to $500,000 and up."

Medical Mal

Perhaps no profession has experienced this confluence of money-motivated lawyers and irresponsible litigants more than the medical profession. We do not write here to pander to the AMA, to bemoan the plight of our poor maligned medical community or to try to forward the notion that the profession is not in need of change - it is, badly. But we are focused in this booklet on America the Litigious, and the medical profession is an all too prime example.

The torrent of lawsuits against doctors - particularly over the last couple of decades - is fueled by a few simple factors: 1) they work on bodies - considered a highly important possession by many; 2) they generally make good money and accordingly, they have assets - stocks, bonds, real estate and pension plans containing more of the same; and 3) they have mal practice insurance giving patients and their lawsuit toting lawyers a double dip at the cookie jar.

The situation has become so bizarre that currently, to look at one specialty, four out of five obstetricians have been sued. Mal practice annual insurance premiums for OB-GYNs can cost $100,000 - $200,000 in some locations. Should a child be born in any way less than Tom Cruise or Julia Roberts, lawyers instantly begin assessing the settlement value of the suit, regardless of what the doctor or hospital may or may not have done. Some states are worse than others; according to USAToday.com, twenty-five percent of the Pennsylvania's OB-GYNs have stopped or are planning to stop delivering babies. Nice effect created by Pennsylvania's lawyers, don't you think?

As to the medical profession as a whole, it coughs up $10-$15 billion a year in direct cash costs of lawsuits.

Litigation as a Profit Center

An article by Walter Olson in Newsday notes that, "A leading Hollywood studio sues it rivals so often that its chairman boasts of having turned litigation into a profit center."

Professionals are particularly at risk. It's not just health care practitioners; other professionals such as CPAs, engineers, architects, and consultants are prime targets for grab at their assets.

This, in an ironic nutshell, is Karl Marx's revenge - a living example of the Communist doctrine, "From each according to their means, to each according to their needs."

The subject is currently the subject of doctor walkouts, Presidential speeches and Federal legislation. But "tort reform", has been on the front burner of legislative priorities in Washington for several years now, and so far, no joy.

So while the politicians mash their gums, and lawyers and their clients search for deep pockets like The Machines from the Matrix, what do you do about protecting your assets?

The Solution

It is our opinion, after extensive international travel and hundreds of hours of research, that the Panamanian Private Interest Foundation offers the strongest, most discrete asset protection of any legal structure on the planet.