Trust and Elder Financial Abuse Litigation: From Intake Through Mediation and Trial

Michael A. Hackard, Founder | Hackard Law

Michael A. Hackard is the founding attorney of Hackard Law, a Sacramento-based firm devoted to estate, trust, and probate litigation. Admitted to the California State Bar in 1976, he has spent five decades representing abused beneficiaries and victims of elder financial exploitation in California and federal courts, including out-of-state clients with California-related matters.

• Education & Credentials

Michael earned his undergraduate degree from California State University, Sacramento in 1972 and his J.D. from the McGeorge School of Law, University of the Pacific in 1976. He is admitted to the California State Bar (1976), the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of California (1976), and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit (1985). He has completed executive-level coursework at the Tuck School of Business, the Wharton School, Columbia Business School, and the Kellogg School of Management.

• Recognition & Leadership

Michael has held an AV Preeminent rating, Martindale-Hubbell’s highest peer review rating, for more than 40 years, and Avvo rates him 10.0, its highest mark. He has been selected for inclusion in Super Lawyers, an honor reserved for no more than five percent of attorneys in each state. He is the author of books on elder financial exploitation in trusts and estates, including The Wolf at the Door: Undue Influence and Elder Financial Abuse and Alzheimer’s, Widowed Stepmothers & Estate Crimes.

• Professional Involvement

Michael is a member of the Los Angeles County Bar Association and has represented clients before federal, state, and local legislative and administrative bodies. He has built an extensive public education practice around inheritance theft and elder financial abuse, including a library of more than 900 educational videos and a comprehensive legal resource guide for victims and their families.

• Experience

Michael’s practice concentrates on estate and trust litigation, undue influence and elder financial abuse cases, trust accountings, trustee removal, life insurance beneficiary litigation, and will contests. His new book, Stolen Inheritance: How the Vulnerable Lose Their Estates — and What Families Can Do (Elder Legacy Press, June 2026), serves as the textbook frame for this program.

Matthew D. Davis, Partner | Walkup, Melodia, Kelly & Schoenberger

Matthew D. Davis is a partner at Walkup, Melodia, Kelly & Schoenberger in San Francisco, where he has practiced since 2001. A trial lawyer with a practice 90 percent devoted to litigation, he has handled legally significant, high-value cases in state and federal courts and has helped recover hundreds of millions of dollars in verdicts and settlements for his clients.

• Education & Credentials

Matt earned his law degree from UC Hastings in San Francisco in 1989. He began his career at a San Francisco litigation boutique, then joined the San Francisco City Attorney’s Office, where he served as Deputy City Attorney from 1992 to 2001. In that role he represented the municipality and its employees in jury trials and appeals in both state and federal courts.

• Recognition & Leadership

While with the City, Matt played an active role in San Francisco’s litigation against the Bank of America, which culminated in a $187 million settlement, and obtained a record-breaking judgment of more than $50 million against a title insurance and escrow company. A court later appointed him class counsel in a landmark consumer privacy case that produced a multi-million dollar settlement, and he tried a class action to a verdict exceeding $25 million on behalf of roughly 1,000 hotel guests.

• Professional Involvement

Matt has focused his practice on matters he personally cares about, working to make communities safer and to prevent future injuries and deaths. A lifelong recreational bicyclist, he has represented numerous injured cyclists and has spearheaded his firm’s annual distribution of tens of thousands of bicycle safety lights for the past eight years. In 2020 he helped prosecute, pro bono, a case on behalf of UC Hastings and residents and businesses of San Francisco’s Tenderloin district.

• Experience

Matt’s results include representing the seven injured survivors and the families of five deceased students in the Library Gardens balcony collapse litigation, a $45 million burn-injury settlement against homeowners and a gas supply company, a $12 million recovery for a paralyzed bicyclist, and a $2.75 million civil rights settlement for a wrongfully convicted man. Elder financial abuse is a growing part of the firm’s practice, and Matt brings the trial mechanics, jury strategy, and mediation perspective to this program.

SESSION 1 – The Recurring Exploitation Pattern: Vulnerability, Access, and the Signing Window | 1:00pm – 1:30pm

The recurring exploitation pattern attorneys see in every state: vulnerability, access, the signing window, the post-funeral call. Three short cases across Alzheimer’s, vascular dementia, and alcohol-related decline show the pattern is diagnosis-agnostic.

SESSION 2 – The Legal Architecture: Limitations Clocks, Presumptions, and the Drafting Attorney’s File | 1:30pm – 2:00pm

The legal architecture: the three limitations clocks attorneys must track (trust contest, elder financial abuse, promise-to-inherit); burden-shifting presumptions on transfers to drafters and care custodians; statutory fee-shifting and enhanced-damages mechanisms; and the percipient-witness doctrine that opens the drafting attorney’s file after the client’s death.

BREAK | 2:00pm – 2:10pm

SESSION 3 – Building the Civil Case for Trial | 2:10pm – 2:40pm

Building the civil case for trial: jury triability, parallel civil-and-probate filings, expert witness strategy.

SESSION 4 – Trial and Resolution: Drafting-Attorney Cross and Court-Ordered Mediation | 2:40pm – 3:10pm

Trial and resolution: drafting-attorney cross, and court-ordered mediation in the shadow of trial.