Creating A Legal Clone
Posted on 21 July 2008 by Justin
You are spending your days blissfully content on the beautiful Indonesian island of North Sulawesi near the city of Manado. You stroll into the a local Internet cafe, intent on writing a message to your friends and family explaining the events that lead to you spending the last week scuba diving with the local dive master. Checking your email creates a cold water reality shower as you learn that not only have you been called for jury duty, but your tax forms are ready to be signed. You have a problem.
It came to my attention recently that a person does not have to be in the United States to have legal problems with the local, state, and federal government. Although this seems absurd, I fear it is true. Luckily the lawyers got together with the law makers and figured out a legal way to get around the many pesky issues that can occur when someone is outside of the country for an extended time. Or in a comma. Or both. This concept is referred to as Power of Attorney.
Creating a Power of Attorney allows me to assign an individual (a.k.a agent) to act legally on my behalf. I like to think of this as my Legal Clone. Now, Legal Clones fall into two categories. The Fully Empowered Legal Clone and the Slightly Restricted Legal Clone. Basically, Fully Empowered Legal Clones can perform any legal duties in the name of their real life, flesh and blood counter parts. These duties include, signing tax forms, taking out loans, opening bank accounts, initiating law suites etc. Slightly Restricted Legal Clones are given specific authority by the principle (read: the person who needs the clone). This authority can be far reaching or limited as desired by the principle.
What makes creating a custom Power of Attorney form truly exciting is the ability to create co-agents. For some people (myself included) one Legal Clone feels a bit limiting. I mean seriously, why would I want one Legal Clone when I can have two? Creating two legal Clones creates a system of checks and balances that insures that even if one of my Legal Clones decides to go AWOL, I am still in businesses.
Finding a free, generic Power of Attorney form online is a straight forward affair. However, finding a fully customizable Power of Attorney form is a bit more difficult. I was able to create forms for both Natalie and myself at http://www.rocketlawyer.com after signing up for a free trial account. The trial account currently lasts for 7 days, and I found that this was plenty of time to create the necessary forms, save the pdf files to my local computer and cancel my account. Although the account does take a valid credit card to set up, canceling the account was a no hassle affair.
Natalie and I now have the forms necessary to create multiple legal clones of ourselves. I bet you wish you had a Legal Clone or two.
From everything I can find on Power of Attorney forms, only the principle is required to sign the form. (The principle must have the form notarized and signed in front of two witnesses.) I cannot find any reference that the agent is required to sign the form. That seems a bit odd as it means that I can appoint anyone my Legal Clone without their say. Does anyone know whether or not the agent is required to sign the Power of Attorney form?
Happy Legal Cloning
I am not sure about this but you could look at your fathers and my Trust paper work, there is Power of Attorney forms for us with them.
I looked at your trust paper work. My original impression was correct: only the individual assigning the power of attorney needs to do the signing. In some ways, that is a bit odd as I can assign power to attorney to any person with a pulse who is a US citizen and they have no say in the matter. On the other hand it makes my life easier so….. I am not complaining.