There are three primary ways attorneys are paid.  First, the dreaded billable hour.  Every minute your attorney thinks about your case translates into a bill you must pay.  Rates can range from expensive to really expensive and a lawyer’s bill can grow quickly when litigating a case.  Second, flat billing rates.  These rates are negotiated

Because a great number of Arizona neighborhoods have homeowners’ associations, a significant population of Mesa belongs to HOAs.  And while HOAs offer people many benefits, sometimes members take issue with their restrictions or policies.  For a brief window, Arizona law allowed for an administrative process to handle HOA disputes, which provided people with an alternative

Arizona homeowners who belong to a HOA should know what is going on with the association they belong to.  Most times, an association’s management company will provide homeowners with records or financial information upon a homeowner’s request.  If met with resistance, however, homeowners should know that Arizona law requires homeowners’ associations to provide members with

Many Mesa homeowners raise questions about whether the homeowner associations’ they belong to can place a ban on pets.  While HOAs do have some latitude as to what types of behavior they can proscribe, very few Arizona HOAs actually place restrictions on what homeowners can do inside the privacy of their own home.  So even

While not every homeowners’ association is identical, most associations in Arizona are either a planned community or a condominium association.  Mesa alone is filled with both planned communities and condominium associations.  These types of communities share many characteristics, but the fundamental difference between the two lies in how the common areas are owned.
Common areas are

The United States grants immigrant visas (green cards) to spouses of its citizens under most circumstances. Marriage to a citizen, however, does not automatically entitle the non-citizen to residency or citizenship. Some have entered into sham marriages for the sole purpose of receiving a visa, a practice known as “marriage fraud.”

Foreclosures climbed to a record high for the third time in five months in July.  July’s foreclosure rate was up 32%  when compared to this time last year and up nearly 7% from June 2009.  Arizona is third in the nation behind Nevada and California when it comes to foreclosures.  One in every 135 households

When I visit with clients about filing bankruptcy, nearly everyone I meet  is at the end of their financial rope and are resorting to bankruptcy when all hope of recovery is gone.  In much of my reading on bankruptcy there seems to be a new approach to bankruptcy, what it offers, and how the Bankruptcy

In filing a bankruptcy case, the goal of the filer is to obtain a discharge. The discharge is essentially an order of the bankruptcy court that permanently bars creditors from seeking payment on certain debts. While most debts are discharged through the bankruptcy process, student loans are an exception to this rule.

A recent study by Harvard University has found that medical bills are increasingly a contributing factor in the decision to file for personal bankruptcy. In fact, the study showed a medical bills were a contributing factor in 62% of all bankruptcies filed in 2007. Breaking down the numbers further, the study found of