Important Information About Ilene L. McCauley’s Office

For all of our Clients and Friends

Now that we are settled in our new office, we want to give you some information to help with communications and some other important matters.

Communications:

We live in an ‘Electronic Universe’. Generally it is easy to contact us. We are available by telephone at 480-296-2036. We are available on the world wide web at ilene@gandmlaw.net. We are available by FAX at 480-284-8401. When the electronic universe is working well, things go smoothly. All of your messages get through to us.

When the electronic universe is having problems, we have problems.

Under our new system, our telephone, fax machine and internet access all run through one super computer. If the super computer has a problem, we may not get your message. It may get lost in the world of our computer.

That being said, we want to apologize to you, in advance. We are here to serve you!!! If we don’t get back to you in what you think is a reasonable time, please call us back. We want to hear from you.

Time with Hospital Bound or Critically Ill Clients:

We have the kind of practice where we help people with estate planning and business planning issues. We are proud of what we do and proud of the kind of services we provide. As such, we love to work with people when they are well, to set up their planning. However, sometimes we must work with people when they are not well. We go to our clients if they are home bound, hospital bound, in critical care and/or in hospice.

We are dedicated to serving our clients whenever they need us. Even so, problems may arise under these circumstances. We may have to cancel an appointment with you, to serve one of our critically ill or terminally ill clients.

We want to apologize in advance for cancelling an appointment with you under these circumstances. If we have to cancel an appointment with you, we will do our best to get you rescheduled as soon as possible. I want to thank you for your patience and understanding.

Medical Directives:

One important part of our estate planning package is the Medical Directive. Medical Directives are documents originally designed by the American Medical Association, which can help your family to make critical medical decisions for you, in the event of critical or terminal illness.

Medical Directives are not required under the laws of the State of Arizona. They are a supplement to your Living Will, Health Care Power of Attorney and other health care documents. We give them to you in your Red Book as part of your Health Care package.

We would love to be able to work with you in filling out this information. However, some of our clients do not wish us to discuss the supplemental materials with them. These clients are concerned about the payment of additional legal fees for documents which may not be required by law. We can understand these concerns. Our firm is very concerned about costs as well as the type of services we provide to you. We want to provide you the best services we can, at a reasonable cost to you.

However, even though the Medical Directives are not a “required” form, they are still very important. Medical Directives are vitally important to your family, when you are no longer able to give directions about your medical care. These documents speak for you, when you cannot speak for yourself.

Please take the time to review your Red Book in detail. Look for the Medical Directives and complete them in full. If you complete them while we are working on your file, we will send them to DocuBank for you. However, if you cannot complete the Medical Directives until after our job is finished, complete them as soon as you can. Then you can send the Medical Directives directly to DocuBank. This practice will insure that the Medical Directives are a part of your Health Care Powers file. This decision could be the difference between life and death.

Fridays:

When we first started to practice law in 1982, we were open Monday through Thursday. We closed the office on Fridays because we did not have enough work or clients to fill a five (5) day a week schedule.

Now we are quickly approaching our 25th Anniversary in practice. The days of not being able to fill our schedule are long gone, thanks to all of you. However, we continue to be closed on Fridays and many people wonder why.

Well we would like to tell you. We are closed on Fridays because we are so busy Monday through Thursday that there is not enough time to complete all of your work during the week. Fridays are devoted to drafting, interoffice communications, and finally to education. These are the days which we have devoted to teaching. We teach client seminars and advisor seminars on Fridays.

All that being said, we still have a receptionist available on Friday. In the event of a true emergency, you can get to us through her.

We are sorry that we cannot be available to you personally on Friday. We want to apologize to you, in advance, for any inconvenience to you, for this policy. However, we believe that closing our doors on Fridays, enables us to provide you with better services the remainder of the week.

Closing:

Wow! This “Important Information” letter is longer than we anticipated. Thank you for your time and patience in reading this letter. We hope that we have explained everything to your satisfaction. If not, and if you have any questions or problems with anything in this letter, please call Ilene McCauley or a member of our staff and let us know. We want to answer your questions. We also want to learn how to serve you better.

Thanks again and have a wonderful day!