About Eric Ridley

I am Eric Ridley, a California estate planning attorney based in Port Hueneme. I serve families throughout Ventura and Los Angeles counties, and I have practiced estate planning since 2010 with a single focus: building plans that hold up when they are needed most.

The reason I practice

My father died when I was twenty-five. He had done everything you are supposed to do. A will. A trust. The basic documents that estate planning attorneys hand you in a binder and call a plan. He believed his family was protected. He said so, more than once.

He was wrong — not because the documents were poorly drafted, but because the documents did exactly what they were written to do. They just didn’t do what he thought they would do.

His wife remarried within a year of his death. She passed within two. And thirty years of my father’s careful work — the house he paid off over three decades, the savings he built through jobs he didn’t particularly love, the things he set aside so that the people he cared about would be okay — passed to a man my father had never met, under a plan my father believed protected his children.

Nobody did anything wrong. Nobody cheated or manipulated or litigated. The plan just hadn’t been built to hold up under those circumstances. And in California, under the law as it stands, there was nothing to be done about it.

I was twenty-six when I understood what had happened. I spent a long time sitting with that — the gap between what people believe a plan will do, and what it actually does. Most families who come to me have a version of that gap in their current documents, and they don’t know it.

That is why I practice the way I do. Not to fill binders or generate paperwork, but to close the gap — to build plans that actually do what the people who sign them think they do.

What I understand about putting this off

Most people who need an estate plan don’t have one. Not because they don’t care — usually because they care a great deal, and that is exactly what makes it hard to sit down and do.

To make a plan, you have to picture a version of the world where you are not in it. Your spouse managing alone. Your children grown and deciding things without you. The people you love sitting in a room you won’t be in. That is not paperwork. It is one of the harder things a person can be asked to do on an ordinary afternoon, and there is no shame in having quietly avoided it.

So it waits. There is always a reason — a busy season, a milestone to get past, a sense that there will be time. I understand that completely. For most of us, there is time. The difficulty is that none of us is told which of us is the exception.

I am not going to frighten you into acting. Fear is a poor foundation for decisions this important, and plans built out of fear tend to be the ones that don’t fit. What I can offer instead is something calmer: an afternoon of clear thinking, alongside someone who has seen how these stories end and can help you make sure yours ends the way you intend.

When my father sat down to make his plan, he believed he was protecting the people he loved. He was right to want that. He was simply let down by a process that cared more about the documents than the family they were meant to serve. You deserve better than that — a plan made with care, by someone who treats your family as more than a file, and who will still be here when it matters.

What I do differently

I don’t hand you a binder and call it done. I build a plan — and there is a difference.

A plan means understanding your actual family, not just the names on a form. The second marriage and what it complicates. The adult child who handles money responsibly and the one who doesn’t. The estranged sibling who might contest. The business interest that creates inheritance problems a standard trust doesn’t address. The person you trust most to step in if something happens to you, and whether they are actually equipped to do it.

Most of what we talk about in those early meetings never appears in a legal document. But it shapes every decision about how the documents are structured, how assets are titled, who is named, and what instructions are left behind. So that when something actually happens — and something always does — the plan holds in the real world, not just on paper.

I also handle the part that most estate planning attorneys leave to you: funding. A trust that isn’t funded is not a plan. It is a document. After the papers are signed, I make sure the right assets are in the right places. Deeds re-titled. Accounts re-registered. Beneficiary designations aligned. That step is where most estate plans quietly fail, years after the attorney has been paid and moved on. It is not where my clients’ plans fail.

Who I work with

Mostly ordinary families. A couple in their fifties who have built something real — a house, some savings, maybe a small business — and want it to go where they intend, without a judge overseeing it and an attorney billing by the hour. A parent who watched a sibling go through a difficult probate and wants something different for their own children. A blended family trying to be fair to kids from a first marriage and a second one at the same time, which is a genuinely hard problem that most standard documents handle poorly.

I also work with people who already have a plan and want to know whether it still works. Whether the trust was actually funded after the documents were signed. Whether the person named as successor trustee is still the right person, or is still alive, or is still willing. Whether the documents reflect what they actually want today — not what they wanted the year they turned fifty.

What I don’t do is draft simple wills for simple estates where California’s default rules would get most families most of the way there anyway. If that is your situation, I will tell you plainly — and I will not charge you for the conversation.

What a consultation with me is like

The first meeting is thirty minutes. There is no charge for it.

I will ask about your family, your assets, and what you are trying to accomplish. I will tell you what you need, what you don’t need, and why — without trying to sell you a product. If there is a plan that makes sense for your situation, I will describe it in plain terms before we discuss any numbers. If there isn’t — if your current documents are solid, or if your estate is simple enough that a full trust plan isn’t warranted — I will tell you that too.

I work on flat fees, quoted before anything is drafted. No hourly billing. No invoices that arrive weeks later with line items you didn’t anticipate. The fee covers the documents, the funding, and annual reviews for as long as we work together — because a plan that isn’t maintained isn’t really a plan.

Most families leave the first meeting with a clear picture of what they need and what it will cost. What they do with that information is entirely their decision. I would rather spend thirty minutes being genuinely useful to someone who doesn’t end up hiring me than close a client who wasn’t sure they needed what I do.

How this practice is built

I run a small practice deliberately.

Not because I haven’t had the opportunity to grow it, but because I’ve watched what happens to client relationships when a firm scales past the point where the attorney knows every client by name. Documents that take three months to draft. Trusts that sit unfunded because no one followed up. Clients who meet the attorney once at the beginning and then work with staff for everything that follows — including the questions that matter most.

That is not what I built.

When you work with me, you work with me. Not a paralegal doing the work I don’t have time for, not an associate reviewing documents I haven’t read, not a process that treats you as a file number between client intake and document delivery. The practice stays small enough that I am accountable for the outcome — not just the paperwork.

My father’s plan failed because the attorney who drafted it was accountable for the documents, not the result. I have never forgotten that distinction.

Practice Areas

• Living Trusts & Wills
• Trust Administration
• Probate
• Estate Plan Review & Repair

Bar Admissions

• Supreme Court of California
• U.S. District Court, Central District of California
• U.S. District Court, Eastern District of California
• U.S. District Court, Southern District of California

Professional Affiliations

• American Academy of Estate Planning Attorneys — member attorneys complete 36 hours of continuing legal education annually in estate planning, elder law, probate, and trust administration
• Ventura County Bar Association
• Beverly Hills Bar Association