Professional Liability - Personal Assets in a Trust? 3

[sundale]

Have any of you consulting engineering firm principals/owners placed your personal assets (home, investments, IRA, etc.) in a revocable trust as a mechanism to better shield them in the event of a potential lawsuit judgment exceeding your E&O liability insurance policy limits?

I know I am posing a legal question to non-lawyers, but I am curious if any of you engineers had done this.

 

[zdas04]

Waross,
I am not certain that your attorney was being responsive to the question. For anyone without a P.E. what he said is pure boilerplate and true in most every situation in most every state. Add in P.E. liability and the rules change dramatically. I certainly am not a lawyer, but since his response did not specifically mention P.E. liability I'd take it with a pinch or two of salt.

[bold]David Simpson, PE[/bold]
MuleShoe Engineering

In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual. Galileo Galilei, Italian Physicist

 

[WARose]

Waross,

Wrong guy....he's electrical.

I certainly am not a lawyer, but since his response did not specifically mention P.E. liability I'd take it with a pinch or two of salt.

I specifically mentioned me acting as the EOR on a project (as a agent of my LLC).....so I do not know how he could interpret what I said as anything but a PE. He handles construction/engineering lawsuits all the time. (That's his area of practice.)

But you have a point in not taking anything a attorney says as gospel.....they do make mistakes.

 

[zdas04]

WARRose,
Very sorry about screwing up your handle, I think it was muscle memory since I've been responding to waross posts for so long.

I didn't say not to take what attorney's say as gospel. I said that you have to take what they say "literally". Attorney training is more focused on precision in language than anything else they learn. Since the statement omits references to your P.E. I would not assume that it applies to a P.E. even if the context of the conversation makes it clear that you were asking about P.E.s. The answer was about your being "engineer in charge", not a about being a licensed P.E. Not dishonest in that what he said was very accurate, just not necessarily applicable. In other words "correct but irrelevant"

[bold]David Simpson, PE[/bold]
MuleShoe Engineering

In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual. Galileo Galilei, Italian Physicist

 

[WARose]

Since the statement omits references to your P.E. I would not assume that it applies to a P.E. even if the context of the conversation makes it clear that you were asking about P.E.s. The answer was about your being "engineer in charge", not a about being a licensed P.E. Not dishonest in that what he said was very accurate, just not necessarily applicable. In other words "correct but irrelevant"

Since the activity of sealing drawings is clearly in the "scope of [my] work for the corporation" (as he put it).....I don't see how PE work could not fall under this category. It's certainly not done as a sideline favor. Furthermore in my first e-mail to him (which I did not post) I specifically made clear that I was talking about sealing drawings. When I first started my LLC, he was the one who stressed the point of using my COA stamp on drawings for this reason.

So while your point is well taken, I think he gets it. However, I have to call him next week so I may ask him again (with stamping emphasized).

 

[zdas04]

I'm not sure that people without a stamp always make the connection that applying the stamp commits your license. An engineer in charge of a project under the industrial exemption can sign off on drawings (happens every day) without a P.E. and everything your lawyer says in his response would be exactly correct.

My company attorneys stressed that if I stamped a drawing for the company and someone filed a suit against the company and against the P.E. it was illegal for them to provide me with legal advice, assistance, or help paying for legal advice or assistance. One of them went so far as to say if I ever stamped a drawing for the company and it came to the attention of Legal, their recommendation would be to fire me on the spot. They treated it as a very big deal.

[bold]David Simpson, PE[/bold]
MuleShoe Engineering

In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual. Galileo Galilei, Italian Physicist