High Conflicts & Misdemeanors

As Lauriann Wright talks about the messy intersection of money and family that often characterizes probate law, she brings up a particularly memorable case. Two adult children had lived off an allowance from their late father’s estate for their entire lives, but now the money was running out and the 60-year-olds had a choice: end their own allowance or let their mother lose her caregivers, her condo, and be shunted off to a nursing home.

Guess which way they tried to go?

“My firm represented the professional fiduciary that the court appointed as [the mother’s] conservator,” Wright says. “We went to court on behalf of the conservator to seek instructions to stop paying the allowances—and the adult kids opposed.”

At first, the court took half-measures and simply reduced the allowance; but as Wright and her team demonstrated the danger of the shrinking assets, the allowances were cut completely. “It took a court to tell the kids, ‘We can’t pay you an allowance anymore,’” says Wright, a founding partner of Wright Kim Douglas in Glendale. “They had never worked, and yet had a sense of entitlement that was like, ‘What am I going to do now?’”

For over 25 years, Wright has been dealing with issues in all areas of probate law and litigation—including conservatorships, guardianships, trusts and probate matters. Her high-profile cases include disputes over the Disney family trust and the media maelstrom surrounding Britney Spears’ conservatorship.  

“In probate, people can get very emotional, but Lauriann takes everything in stride,” says Mitchell L. Beckloff, a retired Los Angeles County Superior Court judge, and current mediator, who has presided over many of her cases. “She’s like the map app on your phone. When you take a wrong turn, it spins and reroutes you. When people get stuck on a case, she figures out a way to reroute them.”

It isn’t always easy. Trust and estate litigation can be wrapped in childhood trauma, complex emotions, and long-standing grievances. Wright approaches them with an understanding of people, and a sense of collaboration that helps the parties involved figure out what to do next.

Indeed, the moment after Wright relates the story of the 60-somethings who were ready to eject their mother from her home, she expresses sympathy for them. “The parents had instigated their dependence—paying them allowances late into their adulthood,” she says. “They didn’t know anything else. They were raised to be financially dependent.”

Being able to find gray areas in first-glance black-and-white situations is a key to probate litigation, Wright says.

“It’s one thing to be book smart and know your practice area, and that certainly helps a lot,” she says. “But if you don’t have emotional intelligence, you won’t succeed in this practice area. You have to understand where people are coming from and what motivates them, because ultimately a successful case is the one you can resolve. That means you’re talking about compromise, and it takes emotional intelligence to get people there.”

Wright’s own upbringing in Orange County in the 1970s was anything but entitled. Her father was a truck driver, her mother a homemaker.

“We had financial struggles, for sure,” she says. “My father was laid off a bunch, and we were on government cheese—an actual block of cheese. This gave me a strong work ethic, because I saw my dad work hard and scramble to get a new job.”

Wright got her first job at age 15, working at Little Caesar’s making pizza dough, then as a cashier at Target and Bullock’s department store. “From an early age, I was in customer service, and that gave me some of the skills I use when there’s high conflict,” she says. “In my field of law, you’re always defusing conflict.”

Her maternal grandparents were both teachers with master’s degrees, and she saw education as a pathway out of an uncertain environment. She remembers thinking: “It’s hard to control your home when there’s financial issues and things are hard, but I can control how well I succeed in my grades.”

In high school, Wright was assigned to be the defense attorney in a mock trial in a political science class. “Even though I didn’t win, I had changed people’s minds by the delivery of my argument,” she says. “It really piqued my curiosity.”

She wound up getting her J.D. at Hastings (now UC Law San Francisco) in 1994. Upon graduation, she was hired by a solo practitioner in LA. After starting in business litigation, she fell into probate litigation. “No one goes to law school saying, ‘I want to be a trust and estates litigator,’” she says. “They don’t teach it in law school.” 

But it fit her perfectly.

Wright’s practice touches on the raw nerve endings of people’s lives. About a decade into her career, she was appointed to represent a 12-year-old boy who had a mental illness, and had been molested by his dad’s girlfriend. “The boy would become enraged and throw a desk at school,” she says. “When you think about what he’d been through, it was no wonder.”

Despite these difficulties, the boy, with the support of his grandparents, set up a charity putting together backpacks of supplies for homeless people. “He was just abjectly mentally distressed by the trauma he’d gone through, but he was trying to make a difference,” says Wright, who represented him to ensure the proposed guardianship with his paternal grandmother was in his best interests. “That case broke my heart.”

Her cases often touch on the American dream: “First-generation moms and dads build this empire with hard work and sometimes little education,” she says, “and then struggle passing it on to their second generation in a way that’s smooth.”

Common patterns emerge: conflicts between a sibling who worked in the family business versus one who didn’t; the challenge of dividing undividable assets. “Some of these adult children are really looking for some sort of validation that they were the good kid, or they were the ones that mom favored,” she says. “That’s not something I can deliver to them, even if we win a trial.”

Thus the need to discover what motivates parties beyond money—such as identity issues, family roles, or simply the desire for control during uncontrollable situations like a parent’s death.

“In a specialized bar like probate,” Judge Beckloff says, “you see the same attorneys repeatedly and know it’s going to be a messy case with some attorneys. A lot of times you ask an attorney a question from the bench and they dance around it. Lauriann always had her stuff together. She’s one of the attorneys you love as a judge.”

Probate attorneys also see each other repeatedly. “In Los Angeles, the probate bar is very collegial,” Wright says. “There’s a real culture of collaboration and congeniality. We all need to work together to try to defuse the intensity, if we can, and focus on the issues.”

Justin Gold, a partner with Gold & Berkus, has worked cases with Wright. “She went deeper into the accounting or deeper into the documents,” he says “She checked and double-checked the facts. And she finds things no one else does because she’s so thorough.”

In 2011, Wright married attorney David Kim, and the two formed their own law firm. Her professional experiences shape how she raises her own children. Both kids are expected to work during summers, volunteer at food banks, and understand their privilege. “I want my kids to have a work ethic and a sense of earning things and not a sense of entitlement,” she says.

The move from a 17-year tenure at a small firm to building her own practice allowed her greater control over case selection. “Being able to choose my clients is everything,” she says.

Her practice keeps trending toward larger, more complex cases. She recalls one estate that included the Fullerton main branch post office as an asset. The building was under a long-term lease as part of a 1950s patriotic investment plan in which Americans were encouraged to buy buildings and lease them to the post office. The situation grew more complex when the estate was sued by the post office in federal court over the terms of the lease—one of 30 issues she addressed in resolving it. “I love that I got to be creative,” she says. “I love getting out the broom, sweeping the floors, and one by one, knocking off those issues.”

She’s quick to add that it’s a collaborative effort. “What’s fun about my practice area is I don’t have to be an expert in anything. I have to spot the issue and then build a team. So I was able to find a lawyer who [specializes in such long-term leases], bring him on to the team, and we got great results.”

Over time, Wright has shifted her practice toward representing professional fiduciaries rather than individual family members. Fiduciaries, licensed by the state of California, are hired to manage someone else’s affairs, including estates, trusts, and conservatorships.

“If I build up too many private clients, it’s so emotionally intense,” she says. “You want to be empathetic and you want to be a caring lawyer, but if you’re too much of that, you’re going to become emotionally drained. You have to protect yourself and set up boundaries because you can only empathize so much.”

Her practice has involved several celebrity cases, including the conservatorship of Hattie Fishburne (mother of Laurence Fishburne), and the trust for Nancy Dow (mother of Jennifer Aniston). She has also represented the Anti-Defamation League in a trust and estate matter related to its charitable bequests.

She is hesitant to discuss details of these cases, exercising a restraint even beyond the normal bounds of attorney-client privilege. Wright frequently speaks at panels and conferences on topics like probate litigation, fiduciary neutrality and conservatorships, but she has done virtually no media interviews. Her low-key demeanor is reflected in her law firm’s building. Located on a palm tree-lined side street in Glendale, it’s easy to miss. The subtle signage—simply: WKD—makes the mirrored building blend in with the small home health-care service and apartment building on either side.

Wright’s attempts at avoiding media attention were upended, and then some, when she represented Jodi Montgomery, Britney Spears’ conservator, responsible for her personal care rather than her finances. The conservatorship, established in 2008, placed Spears under her father’s financial control due to alleged mental health concerns. It became one of the highest-profile conservatorship cases in history, especially when Spears accused her father of being “abusive,” forcing medical treatments, and stripping her of autonomy.

As the case made headlines around the world, Montgomery, as conservator, received death threats. “Lauriann went above and beyond to make sure I was protected and had the security I needed,” Montgomery says. “She even had conversations with one of my family members to assure them I would be OK.”

Wright didn’t encounter any agitators herself; she was merely concerned for her client. This was one of those rare instances when she was forced to engage with the media because the other side was doing so. “You have to defend yourself in that media war, especially when you have a client getting death threats,” she says. “Our default rule of trying to be circumspect had to change.”

Montgomery, who has often worked with Wright, appreciates her intelligence, fierce loyalty, and strong sense of ethics. “This type of work is a minefield of potential lawsuits,” Montgomery says. “When I am working tough cases, it is good to know she has my back. Her positions are always well thought through and make me feel protected.”

But the aftermath of the Spears case concerns Wright. New state regulations have made conservatorships more difficult to establish and maintain, potentially leaving vulnerable adults without needed protection. “A lot of professional fiduciaries will tell me, ‘I’m not taking any conservatorships anymore. It’s just gotten too onerous,’” Wright says. “But I feel a sense of responsibility to the conservatorship system. It is so important and provides a solution that protects the elders.”

That, she says, is where her satisfaction comes from: problem-solving on difficult cases and protecting the vulnerable. “I love making their life better, leaving things better than I found them,” she says. “It’s just very satisfying to be a fixer, to defuse conflict, and get people to work together.”