Florida Rebuttal

The following is an official response from Jay W. Mitton in regards to some of the misunderstandings, false remarks and blatant lies floating around about the 2000 Florida Bar complaint.

During the period 1998 to approximately the year 2000 there were multiple, different companies - some large, some small - from outside the state of Florida going into Florida and conducting estate planning seminars. At many of these seminars the promoters would meet individually with the participants and do their estate planning at the seminar even collecting payments for future estate planning services for wills, trusts, and corporations. The legal documents would then be mailed later to those who had signed up. This practice is illegal, unethical, and constitutes the unauthorized practice of law in every state in the United States, neither I nor my law firm, nor any other company I spoke for, even participated in such reprehensible acts. Over the past 20+ years, I can recall of Texas, California, and maybe one other state contacting us and immediately dropping the matter when they discovered that not at any time did we ever allow a seminar attendee to engage in personal legal consultation at a seminar. We have always adopted a very conservative and careful strategy to avoid even the appearances of practicing law within the 47 states where we were not licensed to practice law.

Nevertheless, in this sweeping process of Florida's concern about the many companies - both lawyers and non lawyers - coming into Florida and illegally practicing law without a license, our law firm was caught up in the broad sweeping net of the Florida Bar. Both our Florida counsel and our Utah counsel said that the whole issue was really irrelevant to us inasmuch as we never did practice law in Florida. Our attorneys advised us that the Florida Bar would continue pursuing the several companies who were in fact violating Florida's laws, but would discontinue any efforts against us if we just signed a simple stipulation that we agreed not to practice law in the State of Florida. So we simply agreed in writing not to practice law in the State of Florida- which we had never done anyway. We were further, jokingly advised by our attorneys, "Jay, this Florida matter is so irrelevant, inconsequential and inapplicable to your law firm, that you could sign this same document in all 50 states and the result would be the same as if you had not signed the stipulation." In other words all we agreed to do was not practice law in Florida - which we had never done anyway. Truly much ado about nothing!

To illustrate the total irrelevance of the Florida matter, following the signing of this document, both I and our law firm continued thereafter doing the exact same things that we had always done in Florida-which was to continue speaking as we had done for over twenty years at thousands of conventions - literally not changing one word of script, and still never meeting with any seminar participant.

There were and are no restrictions whatsoever against our seminar company and law firm by any agencies or any courts. It is truly amazing that after over 30 years of lecturing nation wide, the only issue ever involving court action was this one case in Florida for which our law firm was simply an innocent victim caught up in Florida's justifiable concern about the many non-Floridians coming into their state and illegally engaging in the unauthorized practice of law. In fact, both my law firm and myself completely support Florida's efforts to curb the flagrant abuse of Florida's laws by many "estate planning" groups who do practice law in Florida without a license.

Jay W. Mitton

P. S. Our attorneys handling this Florida matter told us: "This entire problem was largely generated by jealous professionals who wanted to silence your voice on the topic of Asset Protection to reduce their perceived competition in order that they could claim to be the "asset protection" experts in Florida."

P. S. S. See below the Utah Bar's Response to the Florida Bar's assertion, which even the Utah Bar dismissed as completely without merit. And refused to take any action against Jay or his law firm.

Click here to see the official Utah State Bar response