Scott Rahn’s passion for the national inheritance dispute law firm he and long-time friend and co-founder Sean Muntz have been quietly building over the past decade stems from his deep affection for his late grandmother, Mary.
“She was my absolute favorite person,” said Rahn, whose grandmother ran the family farm she was born on in northeastern Wisconsin. After retiring from farming when Rahn was 15, she fell victim to an endless and ever-increasing parade of telephone solicitors who shamelessly took advantage of her advanced age and generosity by securing donations she simply could not afford. Her eventual diagnosis of Alzheimer’s dementia only made matters worse.
“People taking advantage of the elderly bothers me to no end,” Rahn said. “ The last place you should be in your golden years is fending off abusers.”
Rahn, who founded RMO LLP in 2015 in Los Angeles, led the firm’s expansion to Orange County with current managing partner, Sean Muntz, and then to San Diego, Ventura and San Francisco, with national growth in Houston. By the end of 2022, the firm has sights set on opening additional offices in California and Texas.
“We’re going to be in more markets simply because it allows us to help more people,” said Rahn, whose Los Angeles flagship recently moved into a newly acquired 7,500-square-foot office building they remodeled in the posh Brentwood neighborhood of Los Angeles.
Rahn and Muntz’s family values and upbringing, and decades of probate litigation experience heavily influenced the development of RMO’s No. 1 company core value: “Lead with Empathy,” which the firm defines simply as “we’re here to take care of people.” And taking care of people is what RMO does best, with the firm’s hyper-focus on probate litigation and its reputation for securing better client results sooner and for legal spend, you get what RMO calls “Zealous Efficacy,” another core value. That combination — taking care of people, getting them results and putting them in a better place than you found them so they can move past the dysfunction and uncertainty, and on with their lives – the opportunities are endless, particularly when more than $30 trillion intergenerational wealth transfer is expected over the next decade, according to the Financial Post, and an immense uptick in demand for probate litigation in states with growing elderly populations like Florida, according to Bloomberg.
“There are so many people out there who need this kind of help, and so few lawyers who focus on litigating probate disputes. People looking for bona fide probate trial lawyers are an underserved community in need of the help we provide in the way we provide it,” Rahn said.
Because of his firm’s laser focus on probate disputes and use of time-saving technologies, Rahn and his team are able to close cases more quickly, often within a year. Contrast that with most standard probate administration cases, which will take one to two years from the decedent’s death to close, and “[I]n an estate with contested issues or lawsuits, the process may take years to settle and conclude probate,” according to FindLaw.
“By drilling into cases early and learning the facts as well and often better than our clients, we are able to help our clients get better results sooner for less legal spend, which not only adds to their bottom line, but their peace of mind,” Rahn said.
The 49-year-old Rahn grew up in Bonduel, Wisconsin, population 1,500, Muntz between Hawaii and rural Georgia, and the two have tried to bring that same small-town, community-oriented, family feel to their law practice in some of the biggest wealth centers in the United States. After graduating from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1999, Rahn left for the West Coast to attend the University of San Diego Law School, and while working as a summer associate shared an office with Muntz. That decades-long relationship is the cornerstone of the foundation for what Rahn proudly says likely one day has the potential to become a global firm.
“We have to execute on our domestic strategy first, but I can see many opportunities created with the relationships we continue to build internationally,” Rahn said. “The issues that drive probate disputes are as old as man and know no boundaries, which simply means people in all jurisdictions need empathetic lawyers who aren’t afraid of the chaos and emotion that come with these cases and are experienced estate trial attorneys. And our ability to cut through all the noise, connect with people on a human level, and get people real results means we’ll be at home wherever we go.”