Asset Protection Legal Services at the Law Offices of Ryan Reiffert PLLC
Why You Need Skilled Asset Protection Lawyer in San Antonio
Any time you own substantial assets, a successful business enterprise, or work as a professional in a litigious environment, you can become a target for lawsuits or creditors. There are many asset protection strategies that we can offer, including LLC asset protection, Corporation asset protection, Limited Partnership asset protection, and more. Whether you own assets personally or your business owns them, your hard-earned assets can be taken in a judgment if they aren’t adequately protected. While there are some strategies that you can undertake to achieve asset protection after a lawsuit is filed, it is (not surprisingly) much easier to structure your affairs before any lawsuit or judgment. Accordingly, it is highly important to make an asset protection plan before a lawsuit, not after a lawsuit. You want to make sure you are prepared with a comprehensive asset protection plan that is geared toward you and your specific needs and goals. In order to properly prepare for this worst-case scenario, consulting with a competent Texas asset protection attorney is crucial. While there are no completely fail-safe guarantees that you won’t be targeted at some point in time, if your assets are properly structured, it will be more difficult for another party to attach to them. Minimizing any potential leverage another party may have over the things you have worked so hard for offers incredible peace of mind. With the aid of a skilled business lawyer, you can safely and legally protect your assets by restructuring them utilizing legal vehicles – such as using LLCs to protect assets. These will separate them from you or your company while still enabling you to have access and control of them.Don’t Be Caught Off Guard
As an individual with substantial assets or as a business owner, you never want to be caught off guard. Asset protection should not be considered as a quick fix for a current legal issue. Consequently, putting together a comprehensive protection plan should always be proactive, not reactive. By the time you know about an impending lawsuit or creditor action, it will probably be too late to get a protection plan implemented. Moving assets after a lawsuit is filed will only open the door for accusations of fraud.Asset Protection Afforded By Law in the State of Texas
In the state of Texas, we have many laws that already provide a significant amount of protection to individuals and offer a great number of opportunities for shielding assets and income. This makes the state particularly popular for asset protection, so even if a judgment against you is awarded, that party will not have access to some of your valuable assets. In addition to those afforded by the state, there are a wide variety of devices and strategies to protect business or personal assets by ● Creating legal barriers that protect you from personal liability ● Separating assets with separate legal entities ● Maintaining public record anonymity ● Using state income and homestead protections ● Using a series LLC to compartmentalize and safeguard multiple assets ● Equity stripping While every plan must take a tailored approach, some very methodical strategies and vehicles can keep your assets protected from lawsuits and creditors.Taxes, Death, Creditors, and Lawsuits
As they say, death and taxes are facts of life. But for many in the business world, so are creditors and lawsuits. While avoiding lawsuits and creditors will always be the goal, lawsuits and creditors are simply inevitable in some business or professional arenas. Many times, deep pockets are targeted in lawsuits and asset searches are routinely done to establish just that. This is when you want to ensure that you have made it as difficult and cost-prohibitive as possible for someone to get access to your assets. Especially if you are a successful business owner or investor and have accumulated significant assets, or if you work in a high-risk professional environment, you will want to consider more sophisticated asset protection vehicles.Separating Assets
Personal asset protection and business asset protection may use different vehicles, but protection is still the strategy. Business assets can be particularly vulnerable when the entity that operates the business owns the assets. Protecting business assets will start with separating the core business activities from the ownership of its assets. Fortunately, there are multiple methods and legal vehicles and strategies that can be used to protect business assets from lawsuits and creditors.Limited Liability Companies
Solid protection strategies will separate and insulate assets from the core business and from each other, so if a lawsuit attaches to one, it will be limited in its reach. Many times, this will including the use of multiple entities such as corporations, partnerships, and LLCs, in combination, to achieve the greatest degree of asset protection.Q: I created an LLC on the Texas Secretary of State’s website. Does the LLC protect my assets and solve all my problems?
A: Probably not. The good news is that you have made a good start with your LLC-based asset protection strategy, and you are somewhat better off than someone who does not use business entities or use an attorney-developed plan to shelter assets. The bad news is that there are likely still a number of “holes in your armor” and areas where you are open to attack by lawsuits or creditors. LLC asset protection is just the first piece of the puzzle. Using multiple entities with proper structuring, the correct connections between them, etc., designed and implemented before a lawsuit, will give you the most asset protection after a lawsuit.
Valuable assets should be separated from the core operation of a practice or a business. While one entity operates and manages the business, the assets are owned by other entities and can even be leased back to the core business. One method of doing this is through multiple limited liability companies. While the core business’s activity and management takes place through the main management LLC, it holds no real assets so, if litigated against, they aren’t lost in a suit. A series LLC or holding company will hold and compartmentalize assets to keep them insulated from each other and from lawsuits and creditors that target the core business. Even if a suit is filed against the main shell LLC, the holding company has not done business with anyone as a basis for any legal action against it. There are several ways to structure assets, and an experienced business lawyer can offer options such as ● Forming a shell management LLC ● Creating a holding company or series LLC for assets ● Ensuring anonymity when forming LLCs ● Forming an anonymous land trust ● Operating under DBAs ● Using your attorney as a registered agent Your lawyer will be able to direct you on how to best form and operate LLCs, using as much anonymity as possible to ensure the most significant asset protection for your enterprise.