Rarick Trusts & Wills Law, P.A.

Focus and practice areas

Estate planning, trusts and wills, and the probate that comes after them make up most of the firm's daily work. It runs two offices, one in Miami Lakes and one in Weston, and takes clients across Florida. The named service area covers communities in Miami-Dade and Broward counties, among them Doral, Hialeah, Miami, Fort Lauderdale, Hollywood, Miramar, Pembroke Pines, Southwest Ranches, and Weston.

The planning side often ties into asset protection, so the firm drafts a will or trust with attention to how property is held and shielded. That connection matters for people who want a plan that actually holds up when it is tested. Business law and tax work sit alongside the estate work, which suits owners who want a company to pass to the next generation without a mess. Probate and trust administration fill out the core, covering the court process of settling an estate and the steps a trustee has to follow once someone has died.

Probate and what comes after

Trust administration is a good example of where day-to-day help earns its keep. After a death, a trustee has duties to the beneficiaries, deadlines to meet, and property to value and move, and a wrong step can create personal liability. Having a firm that runs this process often means fewer of those missteps. The same holds for probate, where the court sets the pace and the paperwork has to be right the first time.

Two narrower areas are worth naming. When a person who lived out of state dies owning Florida property, a separate Florida probate is usually needed, and the firm handles that ancillary work. Guardianship is on the list as well, for clients who need a court to appoint someone to manage the affairs of a person who can no longer do it alone. Guardianship cases tend to arrive at hard moments, when an adult can no longer handle money or medical choices, so steady handling matters there too.

How the team is built

Phil Rarick is the senior partner, and he is the attorney the site names. He earned a Bachelor of Arts from Indiana University in Bloomington and a J.D. from Indiana University Law School in Indianapolis. Earlier in his career he was counsel to the National Association of Attorneys General, a role tied to the work of state attorneys general across the country.

Around him the firm lists a small support staff: Nancy C. Rarick as office administrator, with Amina Santana and Jamie Palacios as legal assistants. The site describes the group as holding over six decades of combined legal experience. In my opinion, a lean structure like this usually means the named partner stays close to each file, which counts for a lot in estate work where one steady hand on a matter helps more than a crowd.

Work that supports other lawyers

A large part of the firm's history is outside counsel. It states that since 1993, more than 500 law firms have asked it to help their clients on Florida questions. For over 30 years, then, referrals from other lawyers have been a steady source of the firm's work, and that kind of repeat business from the profession says something about how it handles Florida matters. That work also means the firm often sees Florida cases that started somewhere else, which widens the range of situations it has met.

The firm also provides local Florida counsel for attorneys based in other states whose clients hold Florida real estate or business interests. That is a practical service. An out-of-state lawyer who runs into a Florida-specific rule can bring in an office that deals with those rules every day, so the client keeps one main lawyer while the Florida piece gets covered properly.

When an estate is contested

Not every estate settles quietly, and the firm handles statewide trust and probate litigation for the ones that turn into a fight. As a reviewer, I read that as a useful pairing, because the same office that drafts a plan can also defend or challenge one in court when a family cannot agree.

The litigation work includes trust contests, trust terminations, and will challenges. Those challenges often turn on undue influence, or on a claim that the person lacked the capacity to understand the document when it was signed. Handling both the drafting and the disputes gives the firm a close look at how a weak plan tends to fail later, and that view can feed back into the documents it writes for planning clients.

Language and reach

The firm works in English and Spanish, which fits a client base spread across Miami-Dade and Broward. For families where an older relative is more comfortable in Spanish, that can make careful planning talks easier to have, and it lowers the chance of a wish getting lost in translation. The two offices, one in each county, put a lawyer within reach of clients on both sides of the county line.

The material points to a firm built around Florida estates: the planning, the administration, and the litigation that sometimes follows. It keeps offices in Miami Lakes and Weston, works in two languages, and has taken this kind of work since 1993.