Legal Services & Lawyers

John is committed to providing personalized estate planning services in a highly ethical, professional, solution oriented, and cost effective manner. In addition to providing timely and high quality legal services, he is committed to educating the community about important estate planning issues through public seminars.
Mr. Laughton also has a legal background in business and real estate matters and was appointed to the City of Del Rey Oaks Planning Commission and served between 1985 and 1992. He served in the U.S. Army, including a tour of Vietnam in 1971-1972. Mr. Laughton was born in Carmel, CA and raised on the Monterey Peninsula, CA.

Susan Alexander Myers holds a J.D., M.P.A. and an advanced law degree in Taxation (LL.M). She has practiced law in Texas and California for 10 years. Susan is a passionate advocate for seniors and their families and dedicates her practice to issues that arise from the aging process, including plannning for long-term care, Medi-Cal planning, estate planning, nursing home issues, public benefits, and conservatorships. Susan is also an experienced estate and trust litigator. When you have a legal problem, choose an attorney who will represent you with Compassion, Care and Commitment.

For almost thirty years, Mr. Janoff has been representing only injured persons. He has worked tirelessly for clients injured in motor vehicle accidents, by defective products, dog bites and unsafe premises. He has also helped clients who have been the victim of bad faith insurance practices, medical malpractice as well as harassment in the workplace. Often injury can result from unseen dangers such as airborne toxins like mold. Mr. Janoff is one of the few personal injury attorneys willing to take on these tough cases for clients who have become ill due to mold infestation. Mr. Janoff is well known and respected in the legal community for his relentless pursuit of justice and fair compensation for his clients.

My practice focuses on working with individuals and small businesses to create estate and business plans that address the client's concerns and needs.

Tim Hoffman is a pioneering California attorney with a storied, 45-year legal career, during which he has helped recover more than $1 billion for his worthy clients. Mr. Hoffman has successfully tried dozens of matters to verdict, specializing in complex civil cases, and has litigated over 200 arbitrations. He has practiced in Oakland, CA, since 1971, and was most recently selected for inclusion in 2009 Northern California Super Lawyers.

Since the mid-1990's, Mr. Hoffman has been a leader among plaintiffs' employment lawyers, scoring huge victories for classes of thousands of employees at Pacific Bell (who recovered $36 million), Macy's, Starbucks, and many other Fortune 500 companies. In overtime class actions, Mr. Hoffman has represented misclassified assistant managers, stockbrokers, truck drivers, and reservation clerks, among many other categories of employees. Among employees forced to work off-the-clock, Mr. Hoffman has represented classes of handymen, janitors, bike and driver messengers, and others. Mr. Hoffman has represented victims of sexual harassment and numerous other forms of discrimination.

Mr. Hoffman has also specialized in consumer protection cases, including, for example, class actions against credit card companies, and a current case against termite-protection providers Orkin and Terminex, who misrepresent the nature of their services and provide false guarantees to customers.

Other current cases on which Mr. Hoffman is working include: Mevorah v. Wells Fargo Home Mortgage, regarding misclassified loan officers denied overtime; Chu v. Wells Fargo, regarding misclassified stockbrokers denied overtime; and Contreras v. Bank of America, regarding misclassified personal bankers denied overtime.

Mr. Hoffman's best known cases, the Continental Can class actions, alone recovered nearly half a billion dollars from the company after a four-month trial. The company had been discriminating against employees based upon their pension benefits, a practice prohibited under the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA). In that case, the company was shutting down plants based upon how many employees in each location would soon vest their full pensions, laying off wholesale any employees whose benefits were about to vest.

Among Mr. Hoffman's favorite career moments were: having lunch with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in Alabama when Mr. Hoffman was a member of the Law Students Civil Rights Research Council; defending famed 60's radical Abbie Hoffman in a free speech case; preceding current President Barack Obama as a Chicago community organizer and attorney in Chicago Legal Aid; introducing Cesar Chavez at a banquet for the National Hispanic University, where Mr. Hoffman served as General Counsel and a founding member of the Board of Trustees; successfully settling his own whistleblower retaliation case, after he (as a then-Presidential appointee) reported a federal government manager's improprieties; serving as President of his American Federation of Government Employees Union Local, and a member of the San Francisco Labor Council, and representing the Communication Workers of America Local for the last 38 years; volunteering on the Board of Visitors to College of Arts & Sciences at Howard University; and, playing craps with Thurgood Marshall in Puerto Rico.

Mr. Hoffman is a native of Chicago, IL, an alumnus of the University of Illinois (in Champagne, IL), a former President of Oakland's Beth Jacob Congregation, and former Board member of the Anti-Defamation League.

He has been practicing law with Arthur Lazear for more than 30 years, is married, and has four children.