THE LAW OFFICES OF DENNIS F. FABOZZI, TEMECULA

dennis-f-fabozziTemecula attorney Dennis F. Fabozzi, 56, has been practicing since 1977 after graduating from Loyola University. Throughout his 30-year career he has mainly dealt in real estate and business litigation, but recently he is seeing a trend toward elder litigation. “That’s a huge growth area in the law,” he says. “I think it’s where you’ll see a lot of litigation in the next 20 years. A lot of [elder] laws are fairly new. A lot of the case laws are being developed as we speak. It was not an interesting topic until the last few years; the abuses have accelerated as more of the wealth is concentrated in the elderly.” But mostly Fabozzi represents corporations where business owners are splitting up and suing each other. “You can have a two-person corporation and you have exactly the same issues as you would over very large entities; it’s just that there are a lot more zeros on the numbers.” he says. The best advice he can give any business is to have an exit strategy, often called a buy/sell agreement. An exit strategy allows business owners to have a graceful out. A legal document, it’s like a prenuptial agreement or a will. When things are going well everything is fine. But what happens if business partners want out because they’re getting divorced, have to file bankruptcy, convicted of a felony, or simply want to retire? “People put so much effort into starting a business and they don’t think of exit strategies,” Fabozzi says. “So what happens in tough times like today when there are not enough dollars to go around? That’s when the pressure builds. They end up spending far more money on lawyer fees on fighting over splitting up the business than if they had a buy/sell agreement. [Being] without an exit strategy is a client’s nightmare and a lawyer’s dream.”


This article is from the November 2008 issue of Inland Empire Magazine