What Went Into Your Five Mockups

A report for Shadi Shaffer Alai and Patrick Phancao
Phancao & Shaffer, LLP, trading as the Asset Protection & Elder Law Center

Prepared by Tilth & Co, 13 September 2026

Why we did it this way

Before we designed a single screen, we wanted to read everything you have ever said in public.

That sounds like an obvious thing to do. It is not what usually happens. The normal way to build a law firm website is to send the firm a questionnaire, wait two weeks, receive a paragraph, and design around it. We did the opposite. We went and found twenty years of you explaining your own work, in your own words, and we read all of it first.

The reason is simple. You already know how to talk about what you do. You have been doing it on camera, on the radio, in print, and in a monthly letter to your clients since 2012. Nobody needs to invent a voice for this firm. It exists. It just is not on your website.

So the five mockups you are looking at are not five guesses. Every line of copy in them came out of the material listed below.

This report tells you exactly what we read, exactly how much of it there was, and what we found in it. Every number here was counted from the actual files, not estimated.

What we read

Your entire video library

Your YouTube channel holds 119 videos. We pulled the transcript for 117 of them and read every one in full.

The other two were not skipped. YouTube holds no captions for them in any language, which we confirmed directly against YouTube rather than assuming it after a failed attempt. They are named individually in the index so nobody later thinks they were missed.

• 7 hours and 57 minutes of transcribed runtime
• 59,172 words of cleaned transcript text
• Uploaded between 9 October 2012 and 27 June 2022
• Every transcript carries its own view count, date, duration, playlist, and word count

Reading them produced the single most useful thing in this whole report, which is in the next section.

Your radio show

Trust Talk Radio. Six episodes are publicly posted, each one 27 minutes. We downloaded the audio and transcribed all six, word for word.

• 2 hours and 42 minutes of audio
• 29,915 words of transcript

We want to draw your attention to one of those six. In the Tom G. episode, a real client sits down and describes, without being prompted, what it was like to work with you and why he chose you over two other options he had already looked at. He says this:

"I found with them you were just a number, but working with you and your firm, I felt like I was a person first."

And, a minute earlier, on why he finally acted:

"So I quit putting it off and I got around to doing it."

That recording is genuinely unusual. Most firms have nothing like it. It is currently one link in a footer.

Your newsletter archive

Protecting You and Yours. We recovered 90 issues, every one that is posted on your site, running from March 2017 through July 2026. Nine years and five months of monthly writing, signed, first person.

Roughly 414,000 words of your own writing.

Every issue is published as a PDF, so we downloaded each original file and converted it to text mechanically. Nothing was retyped and nothing was summarised, which means the words are exactly as you published them and no transcription error is possible.

This is, by a wide margin, the largest body of dated, attributable, first-person writing this firm owns.

Your client reviews, read verbatim

We collected 98 individual client reviews, word for word, across five sources:

We did not summarise these. We read the actual sentences people wrote, because the way a client describes their own experience is better copy than anything we could write for you.

Two gaps, stated plainly rather than glossed over. Yelp blocks automated reading with a security service, so its reviews are not in this set. Google shows 162 reviews for you and we were able to retrieve only 5 of them, along with the star breakdown, which is 161 at five stars and one at two stars. Logging in as the business owner would unlock both in an afternoon if you ever want the rest.

Your LawQA answers, recovered from a web archive

This one matters more than the others, and it is the reason we are giving you the library.

Between 25 May 2011 and 6 September 2013, Shadi answered 192 questions from members of the public on LawQA.com. Real people, describing real situations, in their own words.

That page is gone. The live link is now a dead redirect with nothing behind it. Those answers are no longer reachable by you or by anyone else through ordinary means.

We went to the Internet Archive, found her archived attorney profile from a 2017 snapshot, pulled the list of question titles off it, cross-referenced every one against the archive's index, and fetched each page that had a surviving snapshot.

We recovered 61 of them. Sixty-three archived pages were reachable in total; two of those turned out to carry other attorneys' answers rather than hers, so we listed those separately instead of counting them.

Each recovered answer holds the question exactly as the person asked it, spelling and grammar untouched, and Shadi's full answer underneath. The askers' own wording is the point. It is the vocabulary of a worried person, which is exactly what a website has to answer.

Sixty-one of 192 is not all of them, and we would rather say that than round it up. The rest are not recoverable from the public archive.

Your published and printed record

• The 2018 cover feature in Attorney Journal Orange County, Volume 143. Shadi as Attorney of the Month, a six-page profile, recovered as the original PDF and as searchable text, all 2,279 words of it including the sidebars, the pull quotes and the client letters.
• The December 2024 feature, "Building a Legacy", covering both partners.
• The 2015 California Business Journal profile of Shadi, "Trustworthy".
• Your book, How to Prepare for Life's Unknown, by Patrick P. Phancao and Shadi Ala'i Shaffer, published by Word Association in June 2012. Both editions located, and the introduction recovered in full. Shadi wrote it and signed it. We did not take the interior of the book, because it is a commercially sold work.
• Patrick's contributed chapter in Wolf in Sheep's Clothing, where he is one of fifteen co-authors.

Five guest appearances nobody had counted

Shadi has appeared as a guest on Probate Weekly with Bill Gross five times between 2021 and 2024. We transcribed all five in full, about 50,000 words.

Our own working brief had assumed there were two.

Your professional profiles, including two that are dead

Both Avvo profiles, both Justia profiles, and both WealthCounsel member pages.

The two WealthCounsel member-ID pages are dead links today. We recovered their content from the Internet Archive, and in doing so found a personal family story of Patrick's that appears nowhere else on the internet, on any site, anywhere in the whole search.

Your website as it stands today

A complete text capture of 32 pages: the home page, the about page, all four attorney biographies, all four staff biographies, all seven practice area pages plus the overview, the FAQ, contact, testimonials, referrals, resources, the disclaimer, and the privacy and cookie policies.

Websites get edited and old wording disappears for good. Now there is a copy of what it said on 12 September 2026.

Your images

175 image files downloaded from your own site, resolving to 46 distinct source images once the responsive duplicates are collapsed.

The good news in that inventory is worth saying out loud: you have professional studio headshots for all eight people, attorneys and staff alike. Not one of them is smaller than 1,492 pixels on its short side, Patrick's is 2,133 pixels square, and Valerie's is larger still at 2,275 by 2,136. That means any of them can fill half a screen on a high-resolution display with pixels to spare.

That is a genuinely strong asset. Plenty of firms this size do not have it, and it is the reason the mockups use real faces everywhere rather than reaching for stock photography.

Nineteen other websites, studied on purpose

We studied nineteen sites across eighteen different firms, one of which sits in two categories. Eight private wealth managers, six estate and trust law firms, and five direct competitors in your own market.

We looked at them for structure before beauty: where the navigation sits, how tall it is, how a visitor is moved from arriving to enquiring, and what every one of them does with a practice area list. Which leads to a point that shaped all five of your mockups.

Every competitor in your market puts a flat grid of practice areas under the hero. A grid says "we do four things." Your four practice areas are not four things. They are four stages of one relationship with one family, running across decades, and then the children become clients and it begins again. Your own reviews say so: at least 15 of the 98, roughly one in six, describe a multi-year or multi-generational relationship. One of them opens, "my experience with Shadi and Patrick stem from a Ten year relationship."

A grid cannot make that claim. An arc can. Same information, completely different promise.

The finding we most want you to see

Across all 119 videos your channel has drawn 421,335 views.

Your single most-watched video has 94,574 views. It was uploaded on 22 May 2013, it runs five minutes and forty-five seconds, and it is called:

"Notice is Required By Law to be given to the Legal Heirs of the Person that Passed Away"

Think about who types that into a search box. Somebody whose parent has just died. They are three days into the worst month of their life and they have discovered that there is a legal notice they are required to send and they do not know how. The title is dry, procedural, and completely unmarketed, and that is exactly why it ranks. It matches the words a frightened person actually uses.

This is not a fluke at the top of a flat list. Here is the shape of the whole channel:

• The top eight videos carry 76% of all your views.
• Nine of your 117 transcribed videos are about probate or what happens after a death. That is 8% of the library.
• Those nine videos carry 41% of all your views. Around 170,940 of them.
• 83 of the 117 have under 1,000 views.

So the smallest slice of your library is doing almost half the work.

And here is the part that makes it useful rather than merely interesting. Your channel has four playlists: Estate Planning Topics, Medicaid and Medi-Cal Planning, Asset Protection 101, and Attorney Shadi Shaffer Answers Your Questions. None of them is about probate. Thirty-five videos sit in no playlist at all.

And your website says nothing at all to the person who watched that video.

Your largest audience by an enormous margin arrives at the one stage you cover least.

One honest caveat, because it matters and we are not going to leave it out. Those top videos are also your oldest, from 2012 and 2013, so raw view counts partly reflect thirteen years on the platform rather than pure demand. Take the direction seriously. Do not take the exact magnitude as gospel.

But that is not who becomes a client, and we are holding both facts

Reading the reviews tells a different story from reading the view counts, and the two need to sit side by side rather than one cancelling the other.

Clients who came to you for planning while they were healthy outnumber elder-care and probate clients combined, by roughly six to one.

So the probate searcher is enormous reach at the top, and the planning client is the actual business. A site built only for the first would be busy and unprofitable. A site built only for the second would leave 41% of your own audience arriving with nowhere to land, which is a lot of goodwill to let walk past the door.

All five mockups hold both facts at once, and none of them asks you to choose.

The other thing the reviews said, which surprised us

We expected fear. Fear is what the whole category sells. Every competitor site we studied leads with urgency.

Your clients do not describe fear. Across nine or more reviews, the single most common thing a client says about themselves is a version of:

"I put this off for years."

Nobody describes discovering a problem. They describe finally doing a thing they had been avoiding for a long time. That is relief with a little embarrassment in it, not panic.

A page written to a person who has been avoiding something reads completely differently from a page written to frighten them. That is the emotional register of all five mockups, and it came out of your clients' own sentences, not from a strategy meeting.

A few things we noticed along the way

These are not part of the design work and they are not criticisms. They are things we happened to see while reading, and we think you would want to know about them whatever you decide about working with us. Every one is a small fix.

There is a copy of your 2018 magazine cover feature on your own server that nothing links to. The six-page Attorney Journal Orange County profile, "Attorney of the Month: Shadi Shaffer, To Educate, Motivate and Protect", dated 30 January 2018, is sitting at assetprotectioncenter.com/static/2025/06/shadi-shaffer-cover-feature-print-version-1-30-2018.pdf. We found it only by enumerating every URL on your site, because no page on the site links to it.

To be precise, because the distinction matters: the article itself is not unreachable. Shadi's own biography page links to an ISSUU copy of the same feature. It is the copy on your own server, the one you control and the one that will still work if ISSUU ever changes its mind, that has no inbound link. There is a copy of that file in the library we are giving you, so it is no longer one forgotten address away from disappearing.

There is a 2021 estate tax figure on your homepage presented as current. The sentence reads, in full:

"As of 2021, you have a lifetime exemption that allows you to transfer a maximum of $11.58 million free of estate and gift tax, as well as generation-skipping transfer tax."

Someone reading that page today sees a specific dollar figure, stamped with a year, on an estate planning firm's homepage. We have deliberately not reproduced that number anywhere in the five mockups, and we have not substituted a replacement, because the current figure is yours to state and not ours to guess at.

Your site still markets the Irvine office in a few places. Your footer, the structured data on your contact page, and both of your California State Bar licensee records all agree on two offices, Costa Mesa and Laguna Beach. Your contact page carries a map for each of those two and none for Irvine. And your own September 2024 newsletter announced the move to Red Hill Avenue, so the record is clear enough.

Three places did not get the message:

• Your homepage title tag still reads "Orange County Probate Lawyer | Irvine Estate Planning Attorney | Asset Protection & Elder Law Center". We checked the title of all 32 captured pages. The homepage is the only one with Irvine in it, so this is a single line to change, not a project.
• The Yelp listing your own site links to is still on the Irvine address, at the -irvine-2 URL.
• The service-area sentences on the homepage and in the sitewide footer list Irvine among the communities you serve, which is probably still accurate and may well be deliberate.

Of these, the title tag is the one worth doing this week, because those words are what a search engine shows a stranger before they ever reach your site.

Worth adding gently: your only non-five-star review anywhere is a two-star on Google from somebody asking whether the office had closed because nobody was answering their calls. It is not a complaint about your work at all. It may simply be a cost of the address showing up in two places at once.

A 2017 award badge is in the same strip as a 2025 one. Your "Member Of" badge strip, which appears on every page, carries eleven badges. Among them is an Avvo Client's Choice Award marked 2017 and a Super Lawyers badge marked 2025. The 2025 one is doing real work. The 2017 one is nine years old and quietly makes the newer one look older by association. The Attorney of the Month badge is marked 2018 and sits in the same strip.

Your book does not appear on your website. How to Prepare for Life's Unknown, by Patrick P. Phancao and Shadi Ala'i Shaffer, published by Word Association in June 2012, is on Amazon in both paperback and Kindle. We could not find its title anywhere on your own site.

Your lead-magnet page does offer "Two Must Have Free Books!", but it never names them, and it fulfils by physical mail rather than a download, so a visitor cannot tell that one of the free books is a book the two of you wrote. Two attorneys who wrote a book is not a small credential, and right now a visitor has no way to learn it.

Two small things on the YouTube channel.

The description carries a sentence that never quite finished:

"Last but no least we this channel will clarify the confusion related to asset protection, who really needs asset protection, and how asset protection can be used properly to successfully protect ones assets."

It is a one-line fix in a text box nobody has opened in years.

The same description opens, "Attorney Phancao will share how you can protect your assets and still get approved for medical without having to spend down your estate." Shadi's name does not appear in it at all, which is why an early pass of our own research briefly concluded that Patrick was the face of the videos. He is not, or rather he is only half of it. Shadi presents in a great many of them, including the most-watched video on the entire channel.

That mattered to us, because it is a small piece of evidence for a bigger point. A text box written once, years ago, and never revisited was quietly telling the world something untrue about who this firm is. That is the whole thesis of the five mockups in miniature.

How we checked ourselves

Depth is easy to claim. Here is the actual discipline, because it is the part that protects you rather than impresses you.

We built a verified facts list before we built anything else, and we split it into three tiers that we never allowed to merge.

• Twenty facts verified by us against a primary source. Both bar numbers and both admission dates, checked against the California State Bar licensee records, not against your own bio pages. The firm's registered name and address of record. The phone number, confirmed three separate ways. Your attorney count and staff count, taken from your own sitemaps rather than counted by eye.
• Fourteen claims that are yours, held separately as yours. Your badges, your awards, your media marks. We did not independently verify these against the issuing bodies, and because we did not, we refused to let them sit in the same list as the ones we did check. Flattening those two categories into one list called "facts" is exactly how an unverified claim quietly acquires somebody else's credibility.
• Nine things we could not verify at all, listed as unverified and treated as unusable.

Then we wrote a rule and enforced it mechanically: no number appears anywhere in the five mockups unless that exact figure is on the verified list. Anything else ships as a visible placeholder in brackets, which looks obviously unfinished on purpose, because an invented phone number looks exactly like a real one in a finished design.

One example of how strict that is. YouTube reports your subscriber count as "3.1K". We render that as "over 3,000" and never as "3,100", because "3.1K" covers anything from 3,050 to 3,149 and writing 3,100 turns a rounded band into a precise-looking integer that no source actually states. It would be approximately true and still wrong.

We also keep a running list of every open question and every thing we do not know, with the question written out and a placeholder sitting in the mockup where the answer will go. The Irvine office is on that list. So is the correct spelling of Shadi's name, which appears three different ways across her own public profiles, and which we are not going to guess at.

What all of this added up to

Seven hundred and thirty-seven thousand words is about nine full-length novels. That is what went in before anyone drew a rectangle.

All of it is yours, and there is nothing attached to it

Everything listed in this report, organised into folders and with a plain-English guide at the front, is a gift. It is already sitting in your folder, and it is yours to keep whatever you decide about working with us.

We built it because we needed it. Once we had it, it seemed obvious that you should have it too. Most firms have no archive of their own work, and you are unlikely to be an exception, because keeping one is nobody's job and it never becomes urgent until the day something has already gone.

Some of what is in there is no longer on the internet at all. Sixty-one of Shadi's answers exist only because we went and pulled them out of a web archive. Both WealthCounsel pages are dead links today. Your own magazine feature was one forgotten address from vanishing quietly.

So we would rather you had a copy than not, regardless of what happens next.

And this was only the demo

Everything above went into five pre-signature mockups. A door-opener. Something to look at over coffee and react to.

We did not do it this way to impress you. We did it this way because it is the only way we know how to do it, and because doing it any other way would have meant inventing a voice for a firm that already has one.

What we have not done yet is the actual work. We have not interviewed you. We have not spoken to Valerie or Shilpa, and there is not one first-person quote from either of them in this entire corpus, which means two of your four attorneys are currently invisible in your own public record. We have not touched the 421,335 views sitting on a channel that has had nothing added to it since June 2022. We have not built a single page for the person who has just lost a parent. We have not gone near the ninety newsletters, which is nine years of genuinely good writing reaching only the people who already know you.

This is the demo.

Prepared by Tilth & Co. Every figure in this report was counted from the source files themselves. Where something could not be verified, it is described as unverified rather than rounded up.

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