Listener Questions!!

Coming up on today's Outlaw Lawyer, we're going to be digging in and answering some listener questions. We're going to talk about employment, wills and trusts, real estate, and privacy laws on the internet. And now the Supreme Court has said, unanimously, this was wrong, fact-based. Your belief at the time doesn't necessarily drive what the actual law is.

It's reasonable, informative. Now, if you take in facts and you think about them and you don't jump to an instant opinion, you're the outlaw. And now, Outlaw Lawyer with Josh Whitaker.

Welcome to this week's The Outlaw Lawyer. I am Josh Whitaker. I am one of your two hosts.

The other host with me is Mr. Joseph T. Hamer. Joe, how are you doing? I'm doing great, Josh. I want to thank you for that original introduction. It sounded nothing like any of your other introductions at all. One of these days, I'm going to get creative and be prepared and really, really, really throw people off, really switch up our intro. How are you doing today, Josh? I'm doing fine.

I would tell our listeners, this is our first remote broadcast. So today, Joseph, you're joining us from the beach. I am. There's palm trees all around me right now. My toes are in the sand. And the sun is beaming on my very tan skin.

And none of that's actually true. I had to hide in a bedroom to get away from my kids and all the noise so I could be here with you, Josh. And it's all worth it.

And it's all worth it. Well, we both have a lot of kids. And so going to the beach with the young children, that's not really a vacation for the parents most of the time.

No, it's not. It's not a very relaxing vacation. I've done a whole lot of making sure they don't drown. That's been one of the first things I've done. Chasing my youngest one and a half year old child. She's been introducing herself to a lot of random people on the beach and going up to families that aren't ours trying to just give people hugs.

So we've been doing that a lot and just having a fantastic time all around. When the our youngest is to say our youngest is six now. But yeah, I remember going to pools and going on vacation and the kids, they no fear of drowning at that age at all.

None, man. And this one, the place we're staying at, it's got a particular death trap of a pool. It's fantastic. It's got a shallow in a deep end, right? So and then you go to the deep end, it's like probably six feet, more than enough space to drown a young child who can't swim. And then there's like a tanning ledge for the kids, like a shallow end where the kids play. And the shallow ends at the deep end. And a lot of times you'll have that tanning ledge and you'll have some form of coping that separates it from the rest of the pool. This is not like that. This is just tanning ledge drop off into the deep end. So literally you don't even see it.

You just drop fall right off the edge. So that's been that's been great as well. So it kept us on our toes, man.

Very exciting. Well, just a reminder, if this is the first time you've ever dialed us in here at the Outlaw Lawyer, our goal is to be a legal resource for our listeners. So we like to take tidbits out of the news, look at Supreme Court cases that just got handed down, kind of put a an apolitical attorney's perspective on on on things like that. And that's kind of what me and Joe kind of focus our time on here on the show. But today we're going to we're going to do something a little bit different with the show. That's right, Josh.

You said it. We we do like to look at various topics from that apolitical legal lens. But we also like to interact with our listeners, you guys. And we like to take your questions and answer those questions. And we've we've put it off for a while. We've been doing a lot of apolitical discussion. So we've had a build up of some listener questions.

And we thought it'd be a good idea to dig into the bag of those questions and just answer as many of them as time will allow today. I should tell you, I should tell you, Joseph, now you described yourself, you're at the beach, you're on vacation. I'm not I'm hard at work here at the law firm of Whitaker and Hamer. So I'm on the third floor of our Garner office at my desk. And I took a small break from working hard for our clients to sit down and converse with you while you're at the beach.

That's great, Josh. And you know, in a way, I'm also working hard for our clients. I'm working on my I'm working on my mental health and recharging that so that I can can give our clients the best legal care possible when I return to the harsh reality that you're currently living.

A lot of times when your sacrifice means the world to all of us. When you come back, a lot of times when you come back from the one week, two week beach trip with the family, with the young kids, that first day back at work, you know, it's almost kind of a little vacation. You know, every day at work for me is a vacation because I love, I love my job.

I love the people. I love the setting. My office is like this beach. It's not as sunny and it's not as relaxing. And it's it's basically nothing like the beach.

But other than that, it's fantastic. The so we got a couple of listener questions. We kind of handpick these because we, you know, when me and Joe take a minute, I know sometimes we'll go over fact patterns that we throw out. Sometimes we'll go over kind of calls that we get every day at the firm. But these questions, we kind of handpicked them because they're questions that we get a lot in our day to day practice. And we thought it might be useful. You know, if you if you hear us, if you're dialed in today, these may be some issues that you're dealing with.

That's right. These some people like to to taste wine and curate that taste. And we like to do that with our listener questions, have a fine, refined sense of the best listener questions. And I just want to encourage you guys as listeners, please do keep reaching out to us. Literally, right now, we would we would encourage you to reach out to us. Again, you can you can reach us anytime. You can call us by phone at 1-800-659-1186. You can also text that number. And again, I encourage you all literally pull your phones out text us right now text us a question.

Just text us how you're doing. You can also reach us via email at questions that's questions plural at the outlawlawyer.com. You can check out our fantastic website at www.theoutlawlawyer.com.

And then we are on virtually every form of face of social media, which means Facebook and Twitter for us. And that is The Outlaw Lawyer. I'll remind everybody to Joseph and I our day job. We are the managing partners of the law firm of Whitaker and Hamer. And so the law firm maintains offices right now anyway, in Raleigh, Garner, Clayton, Goldsboro and Fuquay-Varina.

So that's kind of where we live from nine to five. And we have a, I'm gonna say an armada of attorneys and paralegals. And we deal with a lot of different issues every day, which kind of gives us the background. I've been at this since 04. But our but our firm has, between all of us has many, many, many years of experience.

There's not a whole lot we haven't seen at this point in the firm's life. And so we think we're in a pretty good position, again, to be a legal resource to you, and to help you any way we can. And so that contact information Joseph gave you, you can reach me and Joe here at The Outlaw Lawyer. But you can also reach the firm.

So if, again, you do have any questions, you think you need to sit down with an attorney or you need legal representation, I encourage you to reach out to that 1-800-659-1186 or email us at questions at theoutlawlawyer.com. And if we get something in and you say, hey, Josh, Joe, we need some legal representation, we have some legal questions, we'll make sure the right attorney paralegal reaches out to you to get you a scheduled time to talk to us. Because that is the purpose of the show. That's why we do it. That's right.

And you said it, Josh, we've seen virtually everything at this point. And so I think that makes us perfectly suited to answer these fantastic questions that we have received from you guys, the listeners. So among those questions, one of those questions is about why you may need to trust as part of your estate plan. And we get that, we do a lot of estate planning here at the firm and trust can do a lot of things. Trust are a useful tool in an estate plan, even a simple, you don't have to have, you don't have to be sitting on, I hope you are, but you don't have to be sitting on $20 million to get the benefit a trust and an estate plan can give you.

So I think trust is not something a lot of people deal with every day. So me and Joe are going to take a minute to talk about the trust and as a tool, how it can fit into even your average, two spouses, some kids, your average estate plan. That's right. We're also going to be answering some questions about the unfortunately timed discovery of liens or judgments on your property after you've purchased it and talk about, in addition to that, what it means that North Carolina is an at will employment state.

Yep. So we'll take a question. We'll take a situation that comes up on the real estate transactional side of things that we see a lot. That can be confusing or bewildering if you've never dealt with it before.

And then, yeah, Joe, that at will employment, that confuses some folks too. And then finally, again, time permitting, we are also going to answer another question regarding the right to privacy online and what happens with your data that is compiled as you search online. And that's actually a pretty deep topic that we can go on about because that's one thing that affects all of us is that strange compilation of data.

It seems like our devices are listening to us always. And we'll just talk about that some and what that means. All right, Joe, we're coming up on a break.

So we'll go ahead and break for some commercials. We'll be right back. Coming up next, we will answer our first listener question regarding what it means to have a trust and what the benefits of that trust are. Next.

All right. It's Josh and Joe back with you on The Outlaw Lawyer, gearing up for our first listener question. But before we dive into it, again, we want to hear from our listeners. We want to be a resource for you. You can reach out to us. Our phone number here at The Outlaw Lawyer is 1-800-659-1186. That's 1-800-659-1186. So you can call us. You can leave a message. That line is set up for you to leave us a message. Please leave us some contact information if you want us to reach back out to you. You can also now text that number. So feel free to do that.

Text us a message if that's easier. And of course, we got the email set up. So that's questions at theoutlawlawyer.com. All of our archived vintage episodes, as we call them, live at theoutlawlawyer.com. That's our website. And on Facebook and Twitter, the only social media outlets that we live on, we live there as The Outlaw Lawyer. And Joe, we still don't have any Instagram TikTok plans, I don't think. No, those are in flux.

We've got our scientists working on those. But I just wanted to go back to you talked about the website and some of our vintage episodes. And it's really some classic award-winning episodes live on our website. Some of our greatest hits, episode one, episode three, all the way through episode, what is this, Josh? 14? I think this is our 14th anniversary episode.

Yes. Fantastic episodes and all living squarely on our expertly designed state of the art website. So I didn't mention this, Josh, but it is my birthday today. Oh, wow. There's no other thing I'd rather be doing on my birthday than sitting in a room between two twin beds on my vacation, hiding from my family and talking to you through these headphones. I tell you what, I am the worst with birthdays. I cannot remember. You know, it's kind of a stereotypical male problem to have, but anniversaries, birthdays, they just ain't there, man. I can't remember. That's what Facebook's for, right?

That's the sole reason. That's the only reason that you have Facebook, is to help you remember birthdays. I can barely remember how old I am. Like when I do have a birthday, I kind of have to do the math and like, Hey, am I 40? How old am I? I have to like work backwards and figure it out. So I'm just, yeah, I get to the round numbers and then I stopped. I stopped counting. So I know I'm over 30 and I will pick it back up when I, as I approach 40.

But yeah, it's my birthday, Josh, was expecting you to sing to me and you didn't. And so I was just going to remind you just to make sure that you knew. So, but yeah, so getting to our first listener question, so this question is one that we have, we get a lot actually, and we talk about a lot and it again, involves that, that wills, estates and trust piece. We're talking about the trust piece. And so this listener asks, or states first, I hear a lot about having a living trust and I'm not sure I understand what it is. Can you talk about the benefits of having a trust?

Yeah. So we, so, you know, I have estate planning consults with folks where people come in and they at some point in their life have gone to an attorney, maybe in another state, sometimes here in North Carolina, and they're just redoing it where they have like their fancy binder, right? They went and paid big money for an estate plan and they got a binder, it's got their will and their power of attorneys and their healthcare power of attorneys. And it'll have a, it'll have a very verbose, a well-drafted, you know, living trust and they'll plop it in front of us, right? And they'll say, Hey, this is what I've got.

I was like, Hey, this is a, you know, you got to trust here. You got a revocable, uh, living trust and, and your wills of poor over-willed all these legal terms that we use. And, um, they'll be like, yeah, I don't know what it is. I've never used it. There's nothing, you know, we never put anything in there. Don't know anything about it, you know, so I know there's people out there that even have living trust drafted and available to them, but don't, don't really know what they're for and don't know how to use them.

Yeah. So we, we don't want you to be those people. We want you guys to be well-informed. And when you go into that attorney's office and you plop down your, your trust in front of them, we want you to be able to explain to them what it is. And, uh, so I think the first piece of this question and the first, uh, way that we can kind of dive into the answer is really defining what a trust is at its essence. So a trust basically creates a legal entity that stands separate from you and your estate. So a trust differs from a will in the sense that a trust doesn't require any verification by the court after you pass away, there's none of that probate process.

There's no involvement of the clerk. And it basically operates as its own legal entity that will survive you in the event that you pass away. Yeah, Joe, when I'm talking to folks, I kind of always tell them, you know, a trust is kind of like a will on steroids. You know, it's, uh, it's, you're kind of taking care, you're taking everything out of, out of probate. And so just so everybody knows when an attorney uses the word probate, they're talking about the process of, you know, you have a will, you take it down to the clerk's office, they probate it and make you executor or executrix of the estate. And then you go about doing the business of the estate, collecting assets, uh, things like that. And the clerk, uh, reviews what you're doing to make sure you're doing everything the way the will commands that you do it, make sure all the heirs are getting what they're supposed to. And depending on what kind of probate assets there are, um, that process can be, uh, and depending on what clerk you're working with and what county, but that can be a very intimidating process and a very time consuming process and a very costly process. So, you know, anytime you've got the involvement of a third party, and even if this third party has the best intentions, you know, they're going to have, they've got statutes they're abiding by, there's just, there's other hurdles and there's just more stress to it than there potentially would be without that involvement. So the trust will actually, rather than relying on the court or a statute or your executor to distribute assets, it's going to allow the trustee to pass on money and property directly to your heirs without that court intervention, which is, which is good for peace of mind. It's going to ease stress and it's going to let you more directly control and dictate how your assets are distributed.

Yeah. So in a, in a trust, you still have a, you know, in a, you still have a trustee, right? So if a lot of revocable living trust, you'll be the initial trustee. And then when you pass away, you'll have named a successor trustee, which a lot of times is a daughter or a son. It doesn't have to be, it can be a trusted, it can be an attorney, you know, a trusted professional. It can be your CPA, it can be your investment advisor, but you'll, you'll manage the trust while you're alive.

And so a lot of people, um, will find it's beneficial to put everything in that trust. You know, they've created this entity, um, that's going to outlive you and anything in that trust in theory is, is going to be outside of the scope of probate. So we don't, we're not worried about a clerk. We're not worried about, um, you know, uh, that kind of oversight. You know, you, you'll, you'll still have a trustee who's going to kind of run things and there is oversight. And that trustee has a fiduciary duty to the beneficiary. So no one's, uh, getting away with anything. Uh, but you're out of probate and that's good.

That's a good thing. It's always a good thing to have less court involvement. So, and you talked about it, you touched on it briefly, Josh, but you know, you can, you can appoint your trustee and you can have an individual trustee, but they're like you said, there's also professional trustees. So there are, you know, companies or entities, like you said, a CPA, potentially an attorney professionals that are again, have that fiduciary duty and can protect that interest. And you can, you can take it completely out of the hands of an individual and you can take a lot of that burden off of someone that, you know, you would otherwise not be able to do so if you had an executor. Again, executors generally are going to be a close loved one that's going to be dealing with a pretty long and protracted probate process.

And again, it's just another way that you can kind of ease the burden on those around you after you pass. And then like Josh said, there's a lot of benefits to a trust while you're still alive. There's a lot of things that that trust can do for you. One of the best benefits and one of the things you see a lot of people look into these trusts for in their lifetime is the fact that they've got what we call spend thrift provisions, where you're basically going to be getting protection from creditors during your lifetime for any of the property that you put into that trust.

One thing, Joe, I want to double back. When we're talking about professional trustees, your attorney, your CPA, your investment advisor, they have to agree to be, you can't just make people your trustees all willy nilly. They have to agree to serve as your trustee.

So just I always throw that out there. We have had people come in before and say, oh, yeah, my investment advisor is going to be my trustee here. And I was like, have you have you asked them? And they're like, oh, no, no.

And then they go ask them. And a lot of a lot of folks may or may not do that for you, but just a word of warning, even if you name your trustee, even if it's not a professional trustee, whoever you want to serve in that capacity, it's a good idea to talk to them ahead of time and say, hey, I'm putting together an estate plan. I'd really like you to be trustee if you're willing to do it. And and even kind of talk to them about your assets. You know, that's that's a good thing to just let them know, like, hey, in this trust, I'm planning to put in my bank accounts, you know, I've got the beach house, you know, just, you know, I think it's really hard, especially today, as we get more reliant on logging in on the internet, not getting mailed in statements when someone passes away, if you really don't know them, or know what's going on with their assets, it's kind of hard to figure out what they have, if you're not intimately, you know, involved.

That's right, Josh. And I think just not even from a legal standpoint, but from a practical standpoint, it is very important that you always reach out and check with the person that you're going to entrust with distributing your estate and make sure they're okay with that. I think that's very sound advice. And you won't you don't want to this is not something you want to again, we talk about, you know, the internet lawyers and the people who don't want to, you know, pay for for legal advice or financial advice, and you know, and that's all well and good. Using a trust putting real property into trust, putting your bank accounts into a trust.

That's not something I'd feel comfortable doing with a form I downloaded off the internet, I would want to consult with a professional, get some good advice and some tax advice, which me and Joseph are not licensed to give you any tax advice. But there's a lot that goes into this decision to use a trust when to use it, what goes in it, what tax year, it can, depending on your assets, it can it can, it can be complicated. But it's it's not the hardest thing in the world. Yeah. And and that's funny. You said it, Josh, because we've actually got two professionals currently sitting right here on the radio talking to you. So we encourage you guys, if you you need any help with your estate, if you want to talk about a trust, if you want to talk about us, talk to us about drafting you a trust or reviewing your trust. Again, you can always reach out to us by phone at 1-800-659-1186. You can text that number. You can send us the email at questions, plural questions at the outlaw lawyer.com.

Or again, check out that website or Facebook and Twitter, www.theoutlawlawyer.com. Josh, we've talked a good bit about trust. I think we could talk about trust all day if we wanted to, because it's it's a deep topic. But I think it'd be best we take a break right now and go ahead and jump into some of our other questions. Up next, what do you do when you get a call from the closing attorney?

You've got an old lean on your real property. We'll tell you what to do. All right, we're back from break.

You're with Joe and Josh here at The Outlaw Lawyer. We just spent some time discussing what a living trust was a very basic discussion, but a discussion nonetheless. And so I think we've knocked out one of our listener questions. And now it is time for number two of our listener questions, which I will kick us off with. Listener writes in and says, I am selling my house. The closing attorney's office has contacted me and they've told me there is a lien on my property that I did not know about.

And that is not my lien. What do I do now? Before we get into the meat of that, Joseph, I want to remind our listeners, if we sound a little bit different, it's because we're doing this remotely today. So I am locked in the third floor of the Garner Whitaker and Hamer building at my desk while our friend Joseph is off taking it easy, having a good time at the beach. I'm not having that much fun, Josh.

I'm currently wedged into the smallest room in this very humble beach house, a few inches from the wall, squeezed between two very small twin beds. If you hear knocking on the door, it's my children. They're wondering where I'm at, and they want to spend time with me today, but I'm here spending time with you, Josh, and our listeners.

And there's no place I would rather be in the world than that. Well, good. Well, good. So this question that we get, we get this question, our firm does a lot of, we call it, you'll hear us call it real estate transactional, but basically closings, you're buying a house, you're selling a house, you're getting a refinance in North Carolina, their attorneys are a critical piece of that. If you've moved here from New York or California or some other states that are, we call them title states, you may have closed with a closing attorney.

You may have closed with a title company here in North Carolina, the title companies and the attorneys kind of work together. That's how it is, but it's different everywhere. So a lot of times what we're doing, me and Joe, we are, I like to say this, I haven't said this in a couple episodes, but we are seasoned, grizzled, hardened, and we can take it even further.

That's my three, that's my three adjectives I like the most, seasoned, grizzled, hardened, gray, wrinkled, weathered, real estate attorneys. That's kind of what we do a lot of that. And we, on the real estate side, the real estate law, we've seen everything. I'm never surprised by anything real estate that comes into our office. I challenge you, our listeners, to call us and try to surprise us with a real estate scenario. I think you'll fail.

I think that's a, I don't think that's a challenge you can win. Cause like you said, we're grizzled, we're hardened. Picture me as an old man, calloused face, wind-blasted, staring at the law books, pouring over the public record and just really being hardened to the world of real estate. Well, when you think of us during the show, that's a good, you know, good gray beards. And we do have the old, I like to collect kind of antique vintage legal volumes, right? That aren't really useful anymore.

It's how the, what the law was in the thirties, the forties, the fifties, or like the 1890s. But in your mind, when you're thinking about me and Joe, just think of us, we're in the office. We've got, we've got one of these vintage books in our hand and we're just flipping through. We've got the little glasses on, maybe a pipe, a pipe sounds like it would be fitting. And we're, we're researching, we're digging to answer your questions. Definitely a pipe, definitely a pipe and the oldest books, some of the oldest books you've ever seen in your life, barely even books. They're so old, but again, we've seen it all.

We've seen it all at this point. And one of the most unfortunate situations that we unfortunately see all too frequently is the situation that the listener who wrote in with this question is dealing with the fact that you've purchased a house and now you're going to sell that house. And you trusted when you bought the house that there were going to be no issues and that the title had been searched and that there was no kind of problem there. But you were unfortunately finding out for whatever reason that wasn't the case. And there is a lien on your property that you had no idea existed and that, that very likely predates your ownership of the property, potentially by several owners.

Yeah. So, and, and these come up, I think come up for a lot of reasons, you know, your real estate attorney did your closing and part of that is that there afterwards, you know, if they were paying off any mortgage liens or contractor liens or judgments, those all got paid off at closing. And then whoever's been paid off, they kind of have a duty to make sure whatever that was, was satisfied, right? So if your seller had a mortgage with Wells Fargo and we paid it off at closing or your closing attorney paid it off at closing, then Wells Fargo, once they received that money, they kind of come up and they, they satisfy that mortgage lien. So that lien goes away.

And most of the time, 95% of the time, that's what happens. But sometimes we find out that you refinanced or did something and along the way that whoever got paid off didn't cancel the lien. So the lien still shows up on the public record as an active lien, which, which then has to be dealt with, even if it's been paid off, you know, the, the third parties, us or your buyer, whoever's examining title, we don't have any evidence on the public record. It's paid off.

The lien is still there. And so that comes up a lot. It does. And you mentioned it, Josh, you said, you know, you, you purchased a house and you go to an attorney and you trust that they're going to search title properly. And a lot of times that does happen. And by no fault of anybody, the, sometimes these situations can occur. So you can, you can have situations where no one's necessarily done anything wrong. There's just been someone didn't dot an I, someone didn't do something that needed to be done properly. And that's something that needed to be done in the post-closing process.

And through really no one's fault, you're having this situation come up. And like you said, Josh, most, most commonly I'd say what we see are those uncanceled deeds of trust where you've had a mortgage that's been paid off, but for whatever reason, even though it's been paid off and there's no, no record of any money owed at the bank, there's still that mortgage that exists on record. And like you said, we can't tell that that money has been paid and we can't rely on the fact that you're telling us the money's been paid. Even if you're presenting us evidence that that money's been paid, because what we as attorneys have to go on is that public record.

And the person that you're selling to is going to be dealing with the exact same issue as you down the line. And they may not have that evidence that anything's been paid off. So we have to rely on the public record and that's where this issue has to be corrected. It's always a good time to remind our listeners that me and Joseph are North Carolina licensed attorneys.

So we're not licensed to practice in any other state. If you're listening to this and you're not in North Carolina, what we're telling you probably isn't correct for, for your state, but here in North Carolina, you know, these mortgage liens are usually most people get a 30 year mortgage, um, at least initially, right? So you've got a mortgage, you've got a lien on the property. It's good for 30 years. If you're just looking at it right, if you're a third party and you're coming and you're just kind of looking what's on public record, this is a 30 year lien. And, um, let's say you pay it off in year five, but it never gets canceled. It's going to be a problem for not only the 30 years. Um, but even on the 31st year, it's not automatically canceled. You know, there's a statute in North Carolina that says, I think it's, I don't have in front of me, but it's 15 years after the 30 year period. Right? So that lien is a problem in North Carolina for 45 years before it's automatically considered, you know, you can safely say, all right, that's been paid off.

We're not going to worry about it, even though it was never canceled. So these problems just, you know, compound and go on forever. And then during the course of that time, people pass away. And so the original borrower may be dead. That company may have, the lender may have gone out of business. There can be all kinds of, uh, kind of things that snowball and make these lien issues just, just hairy to deal with. That's right, Josh, we could spend possibly an entire episode talking about how miserable that, that what we're describing, what we're describing here, basically these title issues in order to correct these things, they require what we call curative title work, where you're going to have to affirmatively take some action to cure these defects in title.

And Josh, you called it hairy. I would just say these, these situations just flat out, they they're terrible to deal with. And for several reasons, um, a lot of times you're dealing with link liens that are from one or two links back in the chain. So you've got two owners back that you've got an uncancelled deed of trust from. And the person, the company that, that gave them this mortgage that should have canceled this lien, they may not exist anymore. They could have been dissolved.

They could have merged several times with another bank. So tracking down who you need to deal with often is a terrible, terrible, horribly annoying situation. In addition to that, you've got privacy laws you have to deal with. So mortgage companies are going to be very, very particular about who they release information to and who they talk to about particular liens. So if you've got a couple links back in the chain, you've got an owner who has a lien on and it still exists without some kind of authorization from that person, you're going to have a very difficult time even communicating with the bank about them. So these situations are, needless to say, unfortunate. And the bad thing about them is that they're generally not going to be discovered until you go to sell your property, which means you're going to be under contract on this property. And it's going to have already been sent to an attorney to complete that title work. And that's generally when it pops up. So you're looking at a small window of time to correct these issues.

So what can you do to even correct these things, Josh? Well, in North Carolina, I was going to add, Joe, in North Carolina, the closing attorney technically, not technically, the closing attorney represents the buyer. And so you've offered your home for sale. A buyer's made an offer.

You've accepted it. That buyer is going to go to their trusted attorney, which is hopefully Whitaker and Hamer. We're going to do a title search and we find defects. And that's kind of where the buyer's attorney stops. We call the seller and say, look, we're finding this. This is an issue. And then it's in your court.

Even though you may have never known about it, had no reason to know about it, had no reason to be concerned, the ball goes into your court. And most sellers usually end up hiring an attorney, like you said, Joe, to do this curative title work. There's some legal work that needs to be done to cure the title defect. And I'll tell you what, that's a phone call that sellers love to get, man. They love the call from us telling them that they've got this title issue that isn't even something that they've created and it's going to torpedo their closing and we cannot help them with it.

It literally blows people's minds. It makes them extremely angry and it's not fun news to give to people. And obviously we would love to help everyone. And we are, unfortunately, due to bar rules and conflict rules, we represent the buyer. That's not something that we're really going to be able to assist the seller with. So we have to oftentimes refer these sellers out to different attorneys to help with that. And man, it makes people angry as it probably would anyone.

Yeah. You got a problem that you really didn't have any, a lot of these problems, you really didn't do anything to create them necessarily. It's just one of those things people don't review. People don't perform a title search on their property every year to make sure it's clear and old liens got paid off. And so it comes up from time, most of the time the system works and things get canceled when they're supposed to be, but there's always problems. And we focus kind of on mortgage liens, but you know, if you've had some folks doing work on the house, you may have a contractor lien that pops up or that's right. We might see several different types of liens.

Yeah. So then you can have a, you know, a lot of people get solar panels, you get your pool and there's a UCC fixture filing that's recorded. And that's a lien on the property that a lot of people don't, don't anticipate, you know, I've seen a lot of people get like new HVAC units. If you finance it, a UCC fixture filing gets filed and that's a lien that's got to be taken care of at closing. So it sounds like Josh, there are several, several potential time bomb type of liens out here that, that could be potentially out there.

And that may not be discovered until, you know, it's close to the time for you to close. So I think practically to wrap up this discussion, we love this kind of talk. We could talk about it all day long. And honestly, I think a great idea, you mentioned you don't do a title search on your property, Josh. I think we do a episode. We just in painstaking mind numbing detail, we just teach people how to do a title search over like an hour, just complete monotone. We just lay it out for a man. I, I remember, I remember first year law school where they kind of try to, they teach you how to start searching title.

Ooh, it's rough to get, it's rough to get through that first introductory, how to session. Yeah, I don't want to go through that again, but so I think what we take from this and to, to summarize and answer this listener's question, I think once that lien's discovered, the best thing that you can do is going to be to reach out to an attorney, reach out to an attorney, try to find someone who specifically handles this type of curative title work, which there's not a ton of people who do just that. It's going to be difficult to find someone who specializes in that, but you want someone who's familiar with real estate practice. And you want to get on that sooner rather than later, because oftentimes the timely things that are going to take a decent amount of time to correct and to fix. So you are going to want to jump on that as soon as you possibly can the sooner, the better, and go ahead and try to get it taken care of so that you can go ahead and take care of your closing. Coming up next, Josh and I talk about your privacy online.

Can someone publicly share things that you have sent them privately next? All right. We're back on The Outlaw Lawyer with Josh and Joe. We have knocked out two of our listener questions. I feel really good about that, Joseph.

Joseph I feel great about it. And some of these questions are so good and it feels so good to talk about them. I don't know that we'll get to all the questions today and we'll just, if we don't get to it, we'll just put it in the bag and we'll save it for our next episode where we will talk about hopefully more listener questions.

Keep sending us the questions because we love to talk about the things you guys are interested in. And so, Joseph, you've been at the beach for the first couple of segments. I take it you're still at the beach. Josh, I'm still at the beach for this segment. We took about an 18-second break, have not had very much time to go anywhere.

Sitting still at this little end table with my face against the wall in between the two twin beds in the small bedroom with a crack of light coming in. I can hear the children beating each other outside, screaming. It sounds like a war zone out there.

So I'm going to stay here with you for as long as I can. Josh For those who may not have heard, I know we've mentioned it here or there, but Joseph, he has a lot of kids. That's kind of what he's known for. He's an attorney with a lot of kids. Josh I don't have that many kids, man. I've got several children, but there's people out there with way more kids than mine. I don't want people to get the wrong impression. I'm not John and Kate plus eight. I don't know any other of those shows.

I'm none of those people. Four Children is not the most children. That's not a Guinness Book of Records level of children, but it does feel like a lot.

It does, as I hear them beating on the door behind me. It feels like a lot of kids. Not enough to beat the door down to this bedroom and interrupt my radio show, but enough to rumble the room a little bit.

Josh You have slightly more than me, so in my mind, it's just a ton. Joseph, I was going to mention earlier in the show, I think we mentioned it last week, and we're not going to talk about COVID. We actually don't have a COVID segment this week, but we were pumped about going to Stapleton, and so that show happened. So we were pretty excited to get out with, I don't know, 25,000 of our closest friends and all enjoy an outdoor concert.

So that was nice. Josh Maybe we will add, I'm sure we will have no shortage of COVID things to talk about as early as next week. We'll probably bring the weekly COVID segment back because COVID, as you know, is the gift that keeps on giving. Joseph Well, I tell you that because you would have known that because we are Facebook friends, and I shared some pictures of that concert on the Facebook.

Josh By God, you're a professional, Josh. And what a fantastic segue into our next listener question. This listener writes in and asks, Can someone publicly share an email, a text or a Facebook message that I sent them privately?

So it's a pretty good question. And I want to talk about it some, but also just generally, this raises the topic of your data. And, you know, we all spend a lot of time online, we spend a lot of time surfing the web, we spend a lot of time on Facebook, Google, Amazon, and all of the things you do online, creates data that is tracked, and that is monitored. And, and I think it's just a very robust talking point, we can talk about kind of everyone's rights to their personal data.

But first, first, we'll talk about the listeners question. So generally speaking, it's not illegal to share or post or screenshot a private message, because the law doesn't really consider these things private in that sense. So anyone who sends an email or a text or a Facebook message, or an Instagram or anything of that nature, you basically lose the expectation of privacy once that is delivered. But there's always exceptions, Joe, you know, that's the that's the principle of law at play there.

But there's always exceptions. And one of the one of those exceptions is if parties had previous previously agreed that the messages would remain private and confidential. And if you have that meeting of the minds, if you have that agreement, then in theory, sharing would be a breach of that agreement.

Yeah, you know, that's, that's a good point. There's several things, messages, I've sent people and if those things were sent out without context, I mean, I could I could see those being pretty confusing to people, or upsetting to the untrained eye. So obviously, none of us want our private messages put out there in that way. And I think this really raises an interesting related discussion like we talked about, and that that being, what are my rights to my own personal data. So, you know, most of America doesn't have rights to their data in the same way that Europe does. Europe has the GPDR, which is the General Data Protection Regulation. You know, California has passed a new law that gives consumers a right to be forgotten, which basically means you've got a right to see and delete the data that a company has on you. But generally, in America, we don't necessarily have those same strong protections that they do in Europe. Yeah, and that's interesting, because that's, that's something, you know, you always hear the us older people joke about that, you know, if they had had Facebook when we were kids, there'd be a lot of stuff, maybe there'd be a lot of stuff out there, we wouldn't want to survive. And so these kids today, they're so used to the technology, but they have to be so careful, because this stuff, it follows you. It's, it's, you know, as the way the law stands right now, at least in the US, I mean, this stuff isn't going away, it's going to be there, someone's going to have it. And it's hard to get, it's hard to get rid of that stuff. You can't, the right to be forgotten.

That's an interesting one, you know? Yeah, I want that right. Yeah, that's a good thing.

Yeah, I want that right. I was very fortunate to come up, literally was in college, as soon as Facebook was released and started coming to prominence. And I think no one really, well, you don't do a lot of thinking in your early college years in the first, you know, you're thinking about different things than, than the long, the long term and the long, long picture. But I came, I came to college as soon as Facebook became a thing. And universally, everyone I knew, everyone, it was the coolest thing. We all loved it.

We thought it was great. And you, it wasn't like it is now where everybody could see everything, you know, it was very much more private. You, you had a lot of control over who could see. And I think that's the way it is now as well, but it just, it's more consumed by the public. It's more widespread. It wasn't like that. So we would put literally everything on there and pictures.

And when you're in college, you're obviously you're having a good time. Generally, there's a lot of photographs of that. So I had a lot of things that, that made it onto Facebook that I would love to be forgotten, Josh, absolutely love to be forgotten. So you do, you do have some protections though. So if someone steals information and we'll call it personally identifiable information, or of course, financial data, you know, credit card information or logins or passwords. You know, the theft of that information is, is, is most of the time technically illegal. But that it's hard to track us. It's hard to track those people down if that happens to you.

Yeah. I don't, I don't think we're going to catch those people, Josh. We've talked about cyber criminals, and I think we just assume they're better than us at those things and we're never going to catch them. And so you said it, you know, if someone's stealing your personal identifiable information, if someone's stealing your financial financial information, you know, this is, there's, there's laws and there's statutes that protect against that and that are going to criminalize those things. But outside of that criminalized identity theft type of activity, your rights to your personal data that's collected by various companies on the internet are generally going to be determined by those companies relevant privacy policies. So you're, we're talking about the big disclaimers that you get before you access a program or enter a website that, you know, basically ask you to click on or acknowledge that you've read the acknowledgement or read the privacy policy.

And by doing that, and by accessing that website, you're basically creating a contract with that company and saying that you are going to agree to abide and be bound by the terms of their user agreement or privacy policy. I was, uh, I can't remember who it was, but I was watching a standup comedian. I was watching this set and he had mentioned he had been dating a girl for a little while and they were sitting around one day and he, she was reading something on the computer and he was like, Hey, well, you know, what are you doing?

You've been doing it for awhile. And so she was reading the, the privacy licensing agreement or whatever on some, I don't know if it was Apple music or what it was, but he said he got up, he left, he never talked to her again. Yeah. I think that's a good policy. If someone's reading the fine print, you just write those people off and you get them out of your life.

The sooner, the better. How often do you, you're a lawyer, Josh, one of the finest lawyers I know, bright legal mind. Uh, how often do you read the fine print on websites and things of that nature? Yeah, never, you know, uh, and maybe that, I assume that's what normal and the point that, that was the point of the standup, uh, comic there was, uh, yeah, anybody who does that is, is abnormal or, uh, or, or almost too detail oriented because yeah, I've never, I'll click on anything good or bad that pops up. If I'm trying to get somewhere. What's the worst that can happen, man?

What is the, what's the worst that can happen? You clicking on access and this like, well, you know, Everything's already out there, you know, and I don't do that on the work computers. That's on the, that's on the phone. And, uh, you know, the work computers, you can't click on anything, but you know, the home or the phone you do, but yeah, no one. And I think, I think we need to clarify, we did an entire episode on not clicking on things regarding ransomware. We're talking strictly on agreeing to companies, privacy policies. That's what we're talking about here.

We're talking about that data track, you know, the tracking of your data and things of that nature. Um, because again, if you want to access a site, if you want to use an app, you're agreeing to that, or you're just not going to use the thing that, that is asking you to agree to it. It's like we said, it's a contract. You're contractually agreeing to this. So read it. Even if you find the worst thing you've ever seen in there, it's not like you're going to be able to write in and ask, please, sir, can you scratch this off of your privacy policy? So I can use your app. Thank you.

That's not a thing that happens. You know, we've, we've talked about it before, but you know, uh, Facebook knows a scary amount about, about me, you know, Facebook has figured out that if you put Dolly Parton on anything and advertise it to me, I will think my wife wants it and probably buy it as a gift. So coffee mug shirt, collective book, you know, my wife's a big Dolly Parton fan and it's got me figured out and t-shirts it's got me figured out. It knows I like eighties cartoons and I'm a, you know, I'm a child of the eighties and, uh, it's, it's really dialed me in and, and I really click on too many Facebook ads. Yeah, man. It's scary. They it's like, they, I can't tell you how many times that I'll just be having a conversation with someone about something about a product, literally just a conversation. And you pull your phone up and immediately you're being advertised something that's an offshoot of that.

It's just whether it be some kind of crazy vocal monitoring that you've agreed to, whether it be their algorithms just that good and can deduce from what you're searching that you like these things. It's amazing, man. And it's a little bit scary.

And the it's scary to think of where it's going to go to. And, and as they develop these technologies and they can essentially either predict thought or by the data that you give them can learn things about you. They really got us figured out, man.

They do. You know, I'm starting to get a lot of ads for, um, I don't know what you call it. Uh, medicine that, uh, tries to bring your hair back.

Right. I, uh, uh, I'm getting hit hard. I don't know if I just turned a certain age.

I don't think I searched for anything, but I'm getting hit hard with, uh, Hey, you losing some hair, uh, try this. You know, that's tough, man. If your phone literally just saw your head and just decided that for you, it's like, well, this guy, we're gonna, we're gonna go ahead and send him some information on this, but, uh, yeah, man, it's scary. And it's scary to think about how it's going to develop. Um, it is an ever present part of our lives. And as we increasingly become an online society and become more and more reliant on being online on apps, on technology, it's only something that's going to grow and continue to, to evolve.

Yeah. Joseph there's a, there's no going back now, you know, there's not. So hopefully we at least kind of answer that question before we devolved into a random discussion of Facebook ads. But, uh, again, we always encourage you guys reach out to us.

We would love to hear from you. Uh, we told you to pull your phone out and text us or call us earlier. Do it again. There's no limit. There's no charge for these questions. There's no amount of times you can reach out to us where it will be too much.

We encourage you to do it constantly and with your every waking moment. And again, our phone number here is 1-800-659-1186. You can call that number.

You can text that number. You can email us at questions at theoutlawlawyer.com. You can visit our website at www.theoutlawlawyer.com.

And then we are on both Facebook and Twitter. The Outlaw Lawyer. Go there. And maybe a company will start trying to sell you products related to the Outlaw Lawyer potentially. Coming up on The Outlaw Lawyer, Josh and I will wrap up this fantastic episode and bring everything home with our listener for questions.

Welcome back to The Outlaw Lawyer. Josh and Joe here with you. Again, we've gone through some listener questions. And man, we had so much fun and we got so into answering some of these questions that we have unfortunately run out of time to answer additional questions, which we're just going to put them back into the bag, Josh, for another day.

Yeah, Joe, we'll have to do this again. I really am encouraged by a lot of the questions that we're getting. And the good thing about the law firm is we've got a lot of attorneys. We've got a good general base of knowledge.

So you're not going to surprise us too often. But I enjoy getting some feedback. I'm glad to know people are listening. I'm glad to know we've got some folks out there who are going to use us, use our firm as a legal resource, because that is our goal.

That's right. And you're not going to surprise us, but we still like to know what you guys want to hear us talk about. And we want to be a resource to you guys as well. So we do like to talk about the popular news topics, the Supreme Court cases, the things that are happening day to day.

But we also want to be informational to you guys and touch on things that you want to hear us discuss and arm you guys with the knowledge to go forth and have a robust life away from the radio. I will tell you, Joe, the 1-800 number is the easiest way to get us, whether you have a question that you want us to tackle on the outlaw lawyer, or if you want to, Whitaker and Hamer, if you want to reach the law firm with a legal question that's more personal, either way, you can call us at 1-800-659-1186. And so we mentioned it before, but that phone number is set up to take a message from you. So let us know what we can do for you. We need to reach out to you and schedule a consult.

So one of our attorneys can advise you and be a resource to you. Let us know. You can also text that number. So you could always text a question, text a message to 1-800-659-1186, and that'll end up getting to me and Joe. Always email.

Email's one of the easiest things to do. So our email is questions, that's plural, questions at theoutlawlawyer.com. And of course, our website is www.theoutlawlawyer.com, where all of our archived episodes live. And then on Facebook and Twitter, we are The Outlaw Lawyer, and we'll continue to work towards the Instagram and the TikTok one day. Not really, one day. I think we can get there. We need to get the young people focused on the social media for us. That's true. That's true. But I enjoyed being here with you today, Josh, and I hope you've enjoyed work and you continue to enjoy work, and I appreciate your dedication to the people. All right, well, we'll wrap it up for this week. Hopefully, we'll see you guys next week.