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In San Diego, California there have been recent homes damaged in La Jolla due to the hills and homes sliding downhill and into other homes. This was recently reported in the San Diego Union. The law of torts is about apportioning risks and allocating the burden of loss. One state’s highest court wrestled with these issues in a case that arose when a high-rise building collapsed during a large construction project in a past case.

The plaintiffs were businesses, from hot dog vendors to large law firms, who suffered no physical injuries to persons or property as a result of the collapse, but who lost income when city officials closed heavily traveled streets in the vicinity of the accident. The defendants were the owner, tenant, and managing agent of the building that collapsed.

It is beyond dispute that a landowner who engages in activities that may cause injury to persons on adjoining property owes those persons a duty to take reasonable precautions to avoid injuring them. On the other hand, the court had never ruled that a landowner owes a duty to protect an entire urban neighborhood against purely economic losses, and it refused to do so in the case before it. Businesses in the area may well have suffered purely economic losses due to the collapse, but the court saw no satisfactory way “geographically” to distinguish among them.

San Diego has many naturall disasters. There is an official San Diego County website with tips for disaster preparations. One page focuses on preparations for business’ and one page focuses on preparations for schools. Our law firm of Law Office of Scott C. Soady, A Professional Corporation, LLP is located in northern San Diego County. Please feel free to call our office or e mail with any questions regarding legal matters.

When a natural or man-made disaster strikes, be it a hurricane affecting an entire region or a gas leak affecting one house, it is only natural and appropriate to think first of the very basics of life: safety, shelter, food, and water. But it also makes sense, in the quiet of normal daily living, to make plans for money matters in the immediate aftermath of a disaster. As the saying goes, the best time to fix a leaky roof is on a sunny day. If you have only minutes to leave your home, advance planning for keeping your head above water financially can pay big dividends.

Here are a few pointers:

Vista has some properties which fall into this category. This is not a case from Vista or from the North County Court House. Our law firm of Law Office of Scott C. Soady, A Professional Corporation, LLP has been in business over a decade and would be pleased to offer you a complimentary and confidential consultation either over the phone or by e mail or in person.

Among the kinds of conduct prohibited by the federal Fair Housing Act is the making of any statement with respect to the sale or rental of a dwelling that indicates a preference, limitation, or discrimination based on race, religion, sex, handicap, familial status, or national origin. The most common violators of this law are the actual owners of dwellings or individuals acting as agents for owners. A federal appellate court, however, reinstated a lawsuit brought by the United States against an individual who had spoken neither as an owner nor as an agent for an owner.

The defendant worked as a housing information vendor, compiling information from classifieds and providing assistance to prospective tenants looking for rooms to rent. In the episode that got the attention of the authorities, a deaf man used a relay services operator to call the defendant for assistance. The defendant flatly told the caller that he did not provide assistance to disabled people. When the caller persisted, the defendant responded with profanity and hung up. Similar inquiries from “testers” were met with essentially the same response. In fact, the jury heard “a virtual tsunami of evidence” that the defendant routinely treated disabled people differently from those not disabled, often using profanity to underscore the point.

The below example is not a case from Rancho Santa Fe in San Diego. The State of California sends out notices such as the ones below and these are normally delivered by the United States Postal Service. Our law firm of Law Office of Scott C. Soady, A Professional Corporation, LLP can assist you with your legal matter. Please feel free to contact us by e mail or phone.

Gary bought a house that he and his wife lived in for 26 years. When the couple separated, Gary moved out, but he continued to pay the mortgage for another four years until it was paid off in full. The loan was gone, but not the property taxes–they went unpaid when the mortgage company that had previously been paying them was out of the picture.

The state attempted to notify Gary of the delinquency and of his right to redeem the property. It mailed a certified letter to him at the address of the subject property. Since nobody was home to sign for the letter, it was returned to the state marked “unclaimed.” Two years later, and only weeks before the property was sold to pay the taxes, the state published a newspaper notice of public sale of the property. A buyer came forward, and the state sent Gary another certified letter stating that his house would be sold if the taxes were not paid. It, too, was returned unclaimed to the state. Only when the new owner served a notice on Gary’s daughter at the house did Gary finally learn about the tax sale, but it was after the fact.

In Escondido, as in the example below, there are many companies which allow their employees to access the internet including Google, Yahoo, MSN and others. Unfortunately, some employees take advantage of this access and access other websites with inappropriate content. Our law firm of Law Office of Scott C. Soady, A Professional Corporation, LLP can assist you with legal issues including legal action such as the one below. Please feel free to e mail or call us for a complimentary consultation.

Taking affirmative action before this occurs is the best policy.

By some accounts, a large majority of employees access the Internet on company computers for personal reasons while at work. The obvious adverse effects of this on productivity are only the tip of the iceberg with regard to the potential headaches that such activities can cause for employers. Personal Internet activity by employees can pose security risks to the company’s computer network itself, such as by exposing a network to a computer virus.

In San Marcos, there are many business entities which operate out of the owner’s residence. This is a very complicated area of the law governed by the IRS and FTB regarding any deductions and also the federal and state laws. The penalties and interest can be substantial and our law firm of Law Office of Scott C. Soady, A Professional Corporation, LLP can refer you to a qualified Certified Public Accountant who can assist you with your tax planning. Please feel free to e mail or call our firm.

To pass the threshold for use of the home business deduction, a taxpayer must satisfy the following two basic sets of requirements. The first set concerns the nature of the business activities, while the second set relates more to the place itself.

First, the use of the business part of the home must be exclusive (with exceptions to be discussed below), regular, and for the business. Second, the business part of the home must be one of the following: the principal place of business–the place where the taxpayer meets or deals with patients, clients, or customers in the normal course of business–or a separate, detached structure used for business.

The exclusive use factor means that the area is used only for business, not for a mixture of business and personal uses. However, the exclusive use requirement need not be met when a part of the home is used for storage of inventory or product samples, or for a day-care facility. When the IRS says that the use of the home must be for a trade or business, it does not mean any activity that makes money for the taxpayer. If you use a computer in your den for day-trading of stocks or online gambling, do not count on taking the deduction. As for what constitutes a “regular” use for business, that essentially means business conducted on a continuing basis, not occasionally. Even if a taxpayer has a place in the home used exclusively for business, the deduction is not available if the business activity is only sporadic.
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In Scripps Ranch, some home owners are deducting business expenses from their returns for their business use of their home. This is a complicated area of the law and our firm recommends a qualified and licensed Certified Public Accountant. If you have additional legal questions, please feel free to contact our law office of Law Office of Scott C. Soady, A Professional Corporation, LLP by e mail or phone.

The federal income tax deduction for the business use of a home has a good dollars-and-cents upside for those who qualify. Some detailed questions have to be answered correctly to get to that point, however. Not surprisingly, the IRS publication on the subject makes use of a complex flowchart filled with “yes or no” questions to guide taxpayers to a determination of eligibility for the deduction.

Deductible expenses for a business use of the home include items such as the business portion of real estate taxes, deductible mortgage interest, rent, casualty losses, utilities, insurance, depreciation, painting, and repairs. This is not likely to be an all-or-nothing proposition, though. Generally, an expense is fully deductible if it is direct, that is, incurred only for the business part of the home. An indirect expense, incurred for running the home as a whole, is deductible based on the percentage of the home used for business. Any reasonable method for determining that percentage is acceptable, such as dividing the square feet used for business by the total square feet, or dividing the number of rooms devoted to business by the total number of rooms. If an expense is unrelated to the business part of the home, it is not deductible at all.

In Miramar, as with other neighborhoods of San Diego, fire and smoke are life threatening issues. The San Diego Fire Department has information which is very useful. Many local stores such as the Home Depot have these smoke detectors. Our law firm of Law Office of Scott C. Soady, A Professional Corporation, LLP does not endorse any particular store. If you need assistance with a legal matter, please feel free to contact our firm by e mail or phone.

If you could pay $10 and, in return, get a guard who would warn your family if your house caught fire, would you? Of course you would. Despite this, most people do not have enough smoke detectors in their homes–detectors that will stand guard over your family’s lives 24 hours a day. The evidence shows that using even an inexpensive smoke detector increases your family’s chance of surviving a house fire by 50%, making it one of the best investments you can make for your family’s safety.

Experts recommend installing smoke detectors, the cheapest of which start at about $10, throughout your house. At a minimum, install one detector for every floor and one outside of each bedroom. Test your smoke alarms once a month, and replace the batteries once a year. Make sure that every member of your family knows (1) what to do when the smoke alarm sounds, and (2) the fire escape route from each room. A little advance planning can help make sure that you and your family have a better chance if a fire should start in the night.

In Rancho Penasquitos, there are many employers who use screening tests for employment. Our law firm of Law Office of Scott C. Soady, A Professional Corporation, LLP does not practice in employment law and can refer you to the San Diego County Bar Association Lawyer Referral Service if you need legal assistance in this area. If you need legal assistance in estate planning or family law, please feel free to contact our firm for a complimentary and confidential consultation either in person, over the phone or by e mail.

It is popular now for employers to use screening tests, often administered on the Internet, to weed out a large portion of applicants for job openings before making the more difficult selections from among those who survive that first cut. Such tests are supposed to measure cognitive ability, personality characteristics, or, in fewer instances, the ability to perform in a simulation of the duties that the job requires. The easily administered and scored screening tests have their appeal, especially if you are charged with filling, say, 10 positions from 100 people who have submitted résumés.

A downside to screening tests is the risk that rejected applicants may persuade a court that the tests essentially were a tool to accomplish prohibited discrimination, even though that may not have been the employer’s intent. For example, an employment test that impacts racial minorities or women disproportionately could lead to liability unless the employer can show that the test is sufficiently related to the job and is necessary to the employer’s business.

In San Diego, the Padres have been the baseball team for many years. The below example did not occur at a Padres game however it could have and the analogy is the same. If you are injured in a similar manner at a Padres game, please feel free to call our law office of Law Office of Scott C. Soady, A Professional Corporation, LLP or send us an e mail if you prefer. Our firm sponsored the “Fan of the Game” in August,1999 when the Padres played the Brewers.

Practically since our national pastime was in its infancy, operators of baseball stadiums have benefited from a more limited duty to spectators than that which generally applies to businesses that invite the public to come onto their property. Alone among spectator sports, baseball has fans who actively try to catch errant balls, sometimes even risking life and limb to get one. Even if fans would just as soon avoid the batted or thrown balls, the law has assumed that they are aware of the risks from these balls when they take their seats in the stands. The limited duty favoring fans generally is met if seats with protective screening are provided for as many people as normally would want them.

But what of the unsuspecting fan who is clobbered by a foul ball when he has left the sanctuary of his screen-protected seat to get a beer from a vendor? That was the misfortune of a fan who overcame the limited-duty rule when he sued a minor league baseball team for his injuries. A state supreme court ruled that his lawsuit could proceed under ordinary negligence principles.