When our founding attorney, Patricia De Fonte, was seven, she asked her father what happens after we die.
He said, “We walk past the sun, past the moon, until we reach the apple pie tree.”
That gentle answer taught me something lasting: life’s hardest questions can be met with compassion, comfort, and understanding.
If you meet with Patricia over Zoom, you may notice Justice standing just over her shoulder. Justice was created by Patricia’s brother and best friend, Vincent De Fonte.
She is deeply personal: her dress is made from fabric woven from metal, and Patricia’s own wedding jewelry is incorporated into the design.
There is also a little humor behind her creation. Patricia has always found doll eyes unnerving. When she and Vincent landed on the idea that “Justice is blind,” Patricia knew they had found the answer.
But Justice represents something much bigger.
Patricia takes her oath as a California attorney very seriously. Attorneys promise to support the Constitutions of the United States and California, faithfully discharge their duties, and conduct themselves with dignity, courtesy, and integrity.
For Patricia, those obligations extend to the way she practices law and the people she chooses to serve.
Estate planning is about much more than avoiding probate or deciding who receives property.
It is about who gets protected, whose relationships are respected, who gets to make decisions, and whether the people and families we love are recognized when it matters most.
A thoughtfully prepared estate plan can give legal authority to chosen family. It can protect an unmarried partner. It can help parents make their wishes known about who should care for their children. It can protect LGBTQIA+ families. It can give someone the authority to advocate for you during an illness or incapacity. And it can help make sure that the people you choose – not simply the people the law chooses for you – are empowered to act.
That is one reason Patricia believes access to thoughtful estate planning is a social justice issue.
Justice sits behind Patricia as a daily reminder of the oath she took, the values she brings to her work, and the responsibility that comes with being entrusted with a family’s most personal decisions.
De Fonte Law PC does business with and provides services to people who believe that women’s rights are human rights, families belong together, and love is love.
These values are part of who we are. They inform how we treat our clients, their families, our colleagues, and our community.
Estate Planning With Heart® means there is room at the planning table for your family, your relationships, your values, and the people you love.
And this is exactly what we do as a California estate planning attorneys through Estate Planning with Heart®. We help families create wills, trusts, powers of attorney, and guardianship plans that protect not only assets, but relationships, dignity, and peace of mind.
Estate planning clients often bring fear, anger, avoidance, and uncertainty – What about me? What about my things? What about the people I leave behind? Our guidance helps you remain steady, gain clarity, and make the right decisions for you and your loved ones.
Estate planning is not one and done. We strive to have life long relationships with our clients. Our complementary client service package includes newsletters, email check ins and periodic meetings to ensure up to date estate plans that promote family harmony.
We take tech seriously. We use WealthCounsel to draft our clients documents. WealthCounsel is used by lawyers throughout the United States. More than a drafting tool, WealthCounsel provides education, a community forum and works to ensure documents are up to date with local and federal laws and best practices. We use Clio’s secure file sharing and communications portal to protect our clients privacy. We also engage the services of an IT professional to ensure our systems are safe and sound.
It is important to us that our clients have a terrific team of advisors and we spend a lot of time learning from other professionals so that we can spot issues related to finances, insurance, real estate and more.
Education is a core value for us. Workshops are held monthly online, and anyone with a group of ten or more can request a workshop. We are also voracious consumers of education and attend workshops on everything from NFT’s to bioethics!
Our team at De Fonte Law PC is comprised of Attorneys, Client Relations Liaisons, our Media Director, and our Director of Operations. But we can’t do it all! To provide every client with a terrific experience, we rely on our vendors who provide bookkeeping, IT support, notary services, pies, and more. As a team we practice Kai Zen, a Japanese business philosophy that focuses on gradually improving productivity by involving all employees and by making the work environment more efficient. Kaizen translates to “change for the better” or “continuous improvement.”
