As previous, this particular filing is countering a request by Jamie that Britney pay his legal fees.
I’m actually curious as to how courts typically work this. I know in divorce cases, it’s common for judges to order the wealthier spouse to pay the other spouse’s legal fees, but what about non-divorce situations?
Like this case, for example. However much Jamie Spears may or may not have been unjustifiably compensated, there’s little doubt that at this point he has only a fraction of the wealth that Britney has. But a case like this can be very complex and require a lot of work from high priced lawyers and forensic accountants and other specialists. So suppose Britney can afford to spend $5M on the case - and will do it, because she’s furious at him for having controlled her all these years - and Jamie simply can’t come up with anything close to that. What does he do in such a case?
I don’t think they were expenses. I think most or all of the $6 million was compensation to him for his work as, essentially, her manager. As her conservator, he basically hired himself to provide services to her. He, IMHO, didn’t charge unreasonably for those services. What he used the money for after he “extracted” it was up to him because it was his money. The payments of seemingly excessive amounts for other professional services during the conservatorship is a problem.
I have no idea under California law or generally, and I don’t know the specific facts of Jamie Spear’s claim, but I will just say that it seems weird to me that Mr. Spears expects Ms. Spears to pay his continuing legal expenses. Generally, parties are responsible in the U.S. are responsible for financing their own litigation.
Even if Ms. Spears spends a fortune on accountants and lawyers to go after Mr. Spears, it does not guarantee her any result if Mr. Spears has does nothing wrong. Mr. Spears will need some money to defend himself but the amount he needs to spend on an effective defense might be much less than Ms. Spears chooses to spend on the litigation. It’s not like the party who spends more on lawyers and accountants is guaranteed a victory.
This is a good take. I’m reserving judgment for the moment on how well or how appropriately he managed her money as her conservator. At a minimum, it seems he might have done better, but he certainly could have done worse. But that’s beside the point, because I have been persuaded that the conservatorship should have ended long ago, if it was ever warranted in the first place. I also think he was probably never the right choice for her conservator, if conservatorship was warranted at all.
I would include reasonable compensation for his time as an expense (in fact the principal expense) for the conservatorship. But in that position he has a fiduciary duty and must be scrupulous in accounting for any money he takes out. He can’t just take money for his own purposes when he wants to with a dismissive “six million seems about right” at the end of it.
No guarantees but it gives a huge edge. In complex case involving thousands of decisions and transactions, if one party has the resources to go through all that and present selected decisions and transactions in a context which is favorable to their case, and the other party simply doesn’t have the resources to go through all that and counter it, then the first party has a huge edge and very good chances of success even where more balanced legal teams might give a different result.
It’s pretty well known and documented that major corporations will frequently settle winnable cases for big bucks out of court because (in addition to avoiding publicity) the legal costs of defending are more than the costs of the settlement. They don’t just go for a bare bones legal defense and rely on the truth to set them free. My question is about an ordinary citizen who finds himself in the same position as the big corporation, but lacking the funds to either settle or litigate.
Actually, on looking further into this, ISTM that the request for legal fees is not for legal fees for a legal battle between Britney & Jamie, but rather for ongoing legal costs in winding down the conservatorship.
Nonetheless, my question still stands as a general matter.
But she had a talent manager, didn’t she? A lawyer that also stepped down from the conservatorship when it came under scrutiny, who himself made a couple of million dollars.
IMHO, her dad did nothing but rip her off. If my hypothetical daughter had mental problems that forced her into a conservatorship, the first thing I would have done was stop her performances and get her the help she needed. With the money she had available back then she could have never worked again and been just fine. Hire a dependable person to manage her money, and then help her get better. The very last thing I would have done is take $6 million dollars in “pay” to help her out, while selling off her assets on the cheap to friends and relatives. Or try to start a cooking show using her money. Or give her money to a friend for a lawsuit that my daughter was not involved in. It sounds like her whole family thought of her as cash machine and nothing else.
Hell, I feel sorry for her and I’ve never even heard a single song of hers.
I’m not certain. I thought he was acting as her manager during the conservatorship. As conservator, he was probably de facto filling a lot of roles that would, if separately compensated, add up to a lot of money. Like how on Mother’s Day you read about those estimates of how much salary mothers deserve for acting as personal chef, chauffeur, accountant, fitness trainer, maid, etc. My general sense is that $6 million over 12 years for the work he was doing was not unreasonable. I think under the conservatorship Ms. Spears earned something like $70 or $100 million. Mr. Spears seems like an awful person who preyed on and abused his control over his daughter. I am not defending him. I am saying, however, that if the worst thing he did financially was pay himself $6 million out of her estate, I am surprised not by how much money he took but how little.
He was in complete control of all her earnings for many years. He likely thought his control would never end and that no one would ever look too closely at the records. I would have expected under those circumstances that he would have essentially paid himself a hugely generous salary, like when recording artists sign lousy deals that pay their management companies a third of their earnings and copyrights shared with their manager. I would have expected Mr. Spears to have acted similarly and claimed for himself a massive portion of her earnings in the tens of millions of dollars and I would have expected to see even more massive self-dealing. He is a scumbag but it seems he is less of a scumbag than he could have been under the circumstances.
He did pay a seemingly enormous amount to his attorneys and advisors. It is possible that he kept consulting with them because he wanted to take even more from the estate but that they kept advising against it, which had the unfortunate side effect of running up their fees and wasting the money instead of preserving it for Ms. Spears.
As a side note, I believe that those attorneys were paid for from Ms. Spears estate and that nominally, they all worked for Ms. Spears. Now that she is outside of the conservatorship, I think she will be able to assert any claim or waive attorney-client privilege for those communications. She should be able to look at all the advice and decisions her father was making for those many years. Mr. Spears will likely try to assert attorney-client privilege for many of the communications, under the claim that at least some of the advice was rendered to him in his personal capacity and that he had a separate attorney-client relationship with the same attorneys. The potential conflicts of interest here are enormous and I can guess that courts will not respect such an assertion in most cases from Mr. Spears, particularly if Ms. Spears was directly footing the bill. Ms. Spears may wind up with lots of evidence of Mr. Spears malfeasance from the lawyers in due time but the press write-ups I have seen of the claims so far don’t substantiate them yet.
Judge Brenda Penny ruled against a request from the elder Spears for Britney Spears to set aside money from her $60 million estate in a reserve to potentially cover legal fees, which would include her father’s.
As noted upthread, at the time the conservatorship began, she had less than $3M in assets, having frittered away almost all the vast income she had earned to that point. That was presumably a part of the decision to establish the conservatorship to begin with.
This seems to be the consensus of this thread, and of much of the public.
Myself, I don’t see any indication that he’s any sort of scumbag at all. Other than that I don’t agree with the idea of having people put into conservatorships, but that said, this was done by court order for many years, so it’s not like he had her secretly locked up in his basement or something. He was doing something that society seems to largely accept, abusive as I personally think it is.
Part of the problem he has in terms of public perception is that Britney and her people are free to publically attack him, while he’s severely constrained in terms of what he can say in response since it involves privacy issues on her part. This is being wrangled about in court battles now, with his lawyers arguing to open up more of her medical history to public scrutiny so as to counter the social media-driven narrative. Of course, even if they prevail in that, that decision itself will be viewed by the public as an attack on his daughter, which will further inflame the public against him.
Really the best thing for his public image would be for Britney to self-destruct while on her own, which would make the conservatorship seem much more positive (though some will still blame the residual effect of the conservatorship). But of course, that involves his daughter self-destructing so that’s not something to hope for either.
Bottom line is he’s in a no-win situation in terms of his public image. But personally, I don’t think the weight of the evidence weighs one direction more than the other, in terms of him being abusive or corrupt.
My problem with him is not particularly with his financial management. It seems that he may have started the conservatorship with the best of intentions but over time, he maintained it against her wishes and seemingly against her needs. He should have been supporting her to be able to make these decisions for herself and empowering her to do so as she was able. It does not seem like that was the case.
Conservatorship laws weren’t really set up with people like Ms. Spears in mind. They were intended for people in comas or with severe dementia or the like. People who will likely never be able to take care of themselves or made decisions for themselves. There are ongoing efforts to reform conservatorship laws across the country to get more independent oversight of the arrangements and the have them respect capable peoples’ autonomy when that is reasonable. But, IMHO, Mr. Spears should have been doing those things with his daughter, even if the California conservatorship laws didn’t require it, because he loved her and had her best interests in mind.
She was very young when she became famous and I doubt she was well-prepared for it (c.f, Taylor Swift). Mr. Spears could have used the conservatorship to help her grow into the capacity of famous and wealthy entertainer in charge of her life and career. It seems he never made the effort, preferring instead to continue his control over her. I’m okay with calling him a scumbag. Or at the very least, a very bad parent.
I would assume it was even started “against her wishes”. No one wants to be in a conservatorship. The whole point of a conservatorship is that whatever that person themselves may think, society, in the form of a judge ruling on the issue, determined that this person is not capable of caring for himself. That’s what happened in this case. I don’t know that anything changed over the years other than that Britney did well under the conservatorship, which had the effect of making it seem superfluous.
What does “seemingly against her needs” mean? (You seem to be hedging there.) Now that she’s out, it may be possible to better assess whether she was well served by the conservatorship, but it’s too early for that now.
Virtually all the negative stuff we think we know about the conservatorship is coming from only one source, i.e. Britney herself. She is 1) understandably angry about having been under her father’s control for these years, 2) mentally unstable, and 3) someone whose version of events has been challenged by others. Meanwhile, the counter-story is largely unavailable to the public as above. I don’t think you can take anything at face value at all, and to the extent that “it does not seem” is based on these media stories, I don’t put much stock in it.
I’m all for that. But the point is that these ongoing efforts are challenging something which is currently accepted in society and law. I don’t think you can label someone a scumbag if he simply went along with something which is accepted in society and law, even if you personally think that society is wrong and the law should be reformed (as I do).
It was probably against her wishes when it started but it might have fit her needs. Later, it seemed to do neither.
I am hedging. I don’t know everything. I suspect that over time she stabilized, got some decent advice, proved herself capable or working, and with proper support, could have made her own decisions. At that point, seemingly the conservatorship wasn’t maintained because she needed it but because Mr. Spears wanted to continue it. “Seemingly” is because I could be wrong about what she needs now and about what she needed then. Maybe she will self destruct
But all the positive stuff about the conservatorship comes from Mr. Spears when Ms. Spears seemingly lacked the freedom to speak out and contradict it.
There are lots of people who meet the minimum legal requirements and remain scumbags. Mr. Spears is one more.
The fact that she did very well financially under the conservatorship while she had not been doing so previously is an independent data point. And I think the fact that the judge kept signing off on it counts for something as well.
But even if you took both of those off the table and stipulate that the evidence for either side is weak, then that still leaves you weak grounds for your assertion.
I completely agree with that. However, in your prior post you criticized Spears via disagreement with the entire premise of conservatorships in such situations. My point is that to the extent that your criticism rests on that, then it’s not valid. You want to say that Spears is a scumbag because he went beyond simply going along with the conventionally accepted notions of conservatorship, then that’s OK (assuming you have valid evidence to back it up). But if you’re criticizing him because you think that currently legal guidelines for conservatorships need to be reformed, then I’m on your side as to that, but don’t think that itself makes Spears a scumbag.
This is a fair point. It’s also consistent with the idea that the conservatorship probably met her needs when it started, which I concede.
I’m allowed to have an opinion even on weak grounds. “Scumbag” is nothing more than my having higher expectations for parents than I believe Mr. Spears delivered.
I’d very much argue that a conservator should not able to hire themselves as a manager, or in any other way pay themselves. It should either be a statutory amount they get paid, or the court making the determination. And if that isn’t enough for you, then you can use the money to hire other people to handle the various aspects.
It just seems to me that allowing the conservator to choose how much money to pay themselves leads to a clear conflict of interest. Even if they pay based on what the average cost would be for a manager, they cannot fairly judge if they are doing as good a job as a manager would have. It also incentivizes keeping the conservatee working to keep the money rolling in, even if the conservatee would rather stop working. It incentivizes decisions based on your own financial wellbeing, rather than the general wellbeing of the conservatee.
IMHO it’s very difficult to accurately judge people who have to deal with other people who have mental issues. You seem to be assuming that these could have - and therefore should have - been resolved, and that by failing to do that, Mr. Spears failed her as a parent, and likely due to self interest. I would suggest that mental issues are frequently intractable and that we - including you - have very little insight into the nature of Ms. Spears’ issues in particular (other than their public manifestation).
No, it’s not really all that difficult to judge people in this situation. The vast majority of people who deal with their children’s mental problems do not spend all their money like a drunken sailor. He’s her father, his very first concern should have been for his child’s welfare. If she was so bad that she needed a conservator, there is no way she should have been allowed to do all the performances that she did over the years. How could she agree to any of that if she wasn’t competent to spend her own money? He was in charge of her healthcare and that should have been top of the list. Way before paying himself six million dollars and selling her assets to friends and family at below market value. I’d be willing to bet one American dollar that when this all shakes out we are going to see a lot more money missing or misspent. And if it turns out to be true that he had her implanted with an IUD against her wishes, I hope she get’s back every penny he touched and he get’s a nice stay in a state prison.
Being a conservator is not a full time 24 hour a day job. Hire someone to diagnose and work on her mental health. Hire a firm to handle her money, just like anyone with money does. And she probably needs security of some sort. Then help your daughter get better. Maybe talk to the money people a few times a year. What you don’t need is a bunch of money, a house and a dozen different lawyers that you pay for with your daughter’s money.