by Andy Chen | Feb 19, 2023 | California
If you’re an inmate in California and you want to be able to talk to your friends and family, it’s going to cost you money. Shockingly, there is not much — cough, none, cough — competition in California’s jails and prisons when it comes to an inmate choosing what company to use to place a call to their family. Prices for calls are very high. There are two reasons why these high prices matter. First, the family of an inmate can go into debt. More often than not, the families who do go into this kind of debt are already living with precarious finances. Punishing the family of an inmate makes no sense. Second, if the price is too high and the aforementioned debt is incurred, at some point the family members can no longer afford to incur it. For example, they can’t borrow any more money and the calls to the inmate have to stop. Now, some of you might be thinking that there’s nothing wrong with this. The inmate committed a crime after all and they need to suffer hardship for it. Looking at it from the perspective of making inmates suffer or not suffer misses the point, I think. There’s a more universal conclusion that I think we should all be able to get behind: reducing the occurrence of crime is a good thing so that fewer people get murdered, fewer cars get broken into, and fewer grams of cocaine or methamphetamine get sold. Having the support of family and friends makes it easier to accomplish almost anything in life. I’d say that includes inmate recidivism....
by Andy Chen | Oct 13, 2021 | California, Enterprise
Nowadays, it’s really easy to form a Limited Liability Company (LLC). A simple Google search leads you to a bunch of websites that — apparently — will fill out and file all of the forms for you in a few minutes for a low flat fee. I’ve not used any of those sites before so this is absolutely not an endorsement of any of them. Perhaps I’m old-fashioned in this regard, but I still form all of my California LLCs by hand myself with the California Secretary of State’s office. In this post, I’m going to go over a little bit about what California law allows an LLC to be used for. As it is me, I’m going to specifically answer whether an LLC can be used to form a law firm. If you’re a lawyer or law student in California, you probably know that the answer to that question is “no” but I’ll describe the specific statute(s) involved that support that answer. To answer the first question of what an LLC can be used for in California, the answer to that question is in the California Corporations Code, and specifically Section 17701.04. In short, an LLC can be used for a wide variety of purposes — assuming it is lawful, of course — in California, with the exception of a few purposes that are explicitly prohibited. For example, section 17701.04(b) says: “A limited liability company may have any lawful purpose, regardless of whether for profit, except the banking business, the business of issuing policies of insurance and assuming insurance risks, or the trust company business. A domestic or...
by Andy Chen | Oct 10, 2021 | California, Enterprise
In this post, I’m going to go over a very common question that people have when they form a Limited Liability Company (LLC) in California. Forming an LLC used to be very complicated and expensive. Very few people formed them. Nowadays, though, that cost and difficulty has gone way down. LLCs are now available to more people. Just do a quick Google search and you’ll inevitably find many sites promising to help you fill out and file all of the necessary forms in a short time for a low fixed fee. The question, though, is this: Is the Operating Agreement one of those documents that has to be filed with the State of California? Before answering that question, as background for those who don’t know, an Operating Agreement is, well, an agreement between the various people or entities who have decided to form the LLC together. As all of these parties are going to be involved in the LLC, two of many things an Operating Agreement typically goes over are (1) what the various parties are each responsible for doing, and (2) what the various parties are each entitled to receive. As you can hopefully guess, any time multiple people are involved in doing something, there is always the chance for disagreements to occur. Disagreements, fundamentally, are what lead to litigation. For a more complete list of what an Operating Agreement can cover, take a look at Section 17701.10 of the California Corporations Code. If you’re interested, the term “Operating Agreement” is defined in Section 17701.02(s) of the California Corporations Code: “’Operating agreement’” means the agreement, whether or not...
by Andy Chen | Jul 4, 2021 | California, Family Law
For your annoyance, er, amusement today, I present another blog post on California child support. Today, I’m specifically going to talk about when it’s possible under California law for the parents of a minor child to agree to an amount that’s different than what the family court computes. To begin, it’s helpful to understand what California child support consists of. I have a video on my Youtube channel where I go over the various components that go into the overall child support figure that a parent either pays or receives. Most laypeople just know the overall figure and don’t actually know what goes into computing it. This amount, of course, is computed in the comfort and peace of a courtroom. What kind of child support actually works in the real world, though, can easily be very different. If this is your situation, do you and the other parent have the ability to adjust your child support? Or do you have to live with some impractical figure that was computed by someone who may not actually know your life? The answer is yes, you and the other parent do have the ability to inject some realism into the child support amount that applies in your case. The governing law for that in California is Section 4065 of the Family Code. Section 4065 says that the parties to a case can agree to go below the guideline amount computed with the formula in Section 4055 if the two of them declare the following to be true: They are fully informed of their rights concerning child support The order is being agreed...
by Andy Chen | Jul 2, 2021 | California, Family Law
If you’re involved in a child custody or visitation case, there’s a good chance you’ve encountered the term “best interests of the child.” As a general rule, when there are minor children involved in a California family law case, courts will try their best to come up with a custody and visitation arrangement that is in the best interests of the child. The phrase “best interests” is tossed around a great deal, though, without much definition or specificity. In this post, I’m going to try and change that by, as should be no surprise, going over a California statute. I’ll toss in a little common sense at the end also. The Statute When it comes to statutes, there’s two-levels of analysis. First, the statute — Section 3011 of California’s Family Code, if you want to look it up — does contain a list of factors that courts can consider when trying to determine what is and is not in a child’s best interest. The second-level, though, is that this list is not exhaustive. In other words, the court can also consider factors other than what the statute explicitly lists. The list in Section 3011 says: The “health, safety, and welfare of the child”; Whatever history of abuse exists, if any, that is perpetrated by the party seeking custody now; ( The “nature and amount of contact with both parents”; (If this is your situation, you need to read the text of Section 3011 as well as that of Section 3046 because a lot of exceptions apply). The “habitual or continual illegal use of controlled substances,” abuse of alcohol, or...
