We Filed a Bar Complaint Over the “45 FAPT Cases” List

On August 13, 2026, Blake Harris Law filed a complaint with the State Bar of Nevada concerning published descriptions of offshore asset protection trust case law. This post explains what the complaint says and publishes it in full so you can read it rather than take our summary of it.

One thing first, because it matters more than anything else here: a bar complaint is an allegation, not a finding. The State Bar decides whether to investigate and what follows. No disciplinary determination has been made against anyone, and nothing below should be read as saying otherwise.

What the complaint concerns

For months, a chart titled "45 FAPT Cases Gone Wrong" circulated among attorneys and the public, presenting forty-five court decisions as proof that foreign asset protection trusts fail. Our attorneys read the cited decisions and published a case-by-case review of every entry.

The complaint alleges that the chart described court decisions in materially inaccurate ways, that the inaccuracies continued to circulate after specific notice, and that comparative advertising claims on the firm's website were sourced solely to anonymous chatbot outputs that cannot be reproduced. It identifies Nevada Rules of Professional Conduct 7.1 and 8.4(c) as the provisions it believes are implicated, while stating expressly that the Office of Bar Counsel will make its own determination.

The part that is not a matter of opinion

Reasonable practitioners disagree about how strong offshore trusts are. That is a legitimate professional debate, and we have no quarrel with anyone who argues the other side of it.

This is a narrower question. Whether a particular decision involved an offshore trust is not an opinion. It is verifiable by reading the decision. Several entries do not survive that check:

The count itself is also inflated. Morris v. Wroble is the same Merry Morris action as Morris v. Morris, and In re Brooks duplicates Sattin v. Brooks. In re Steering Committee and In re Tinsley could not be located despite extensive research.

Beyond that, the chart treats a contempt order against a settlor as though a court had reached the trust. In many of the cited matters the debtor was sanctioned personally while the trust assets were never recovered — which is closer to evidence that the structure held than evidence that it failed. Our full analysis of that distinction is in the case-by-case review of all forty-five entries.

The record behind the filing

The complaint sets out a sequence, and the documents are attached to it as exhibits.

• November 18, 2025. Blake Harris wrote privately, months before any public disagreement, raising the inaccuracies and inviting correction. The reply came the same day, defending the statements and declining to correct them.
• Mid-2026. The concerns were raised publicly, including in comments on the author's own posts.
• August 7, 2026. A final request: remove the list by end of day Monday, August 10, and the matter would be dropped.
• August 8–9, 2026. In public comments, the author wrote that the cases "came from multiple sources," that "some of them aren't actual trust cases," and that "I haven't read them all."
• August 10, 2026. The chart was removed. The same post directed readers to three third-party articles presenting similar lists, with the argument that the exact number does not matter because "there are several, not zero."
• August 13, 2026. The complaint was filed.

That written acknowledgment is the heart of it. A document circulated to the profession and the public as proof of forty-five failures was compiled from other sources, was not fully read by the person circulating it, and contains entries its own author agrees are not trust cases.

Why the number matters

It would be easy to treat this as a quarrel about arithmetic. It is not.

People deciding whether to protect what they have built rely on what practitioners tell them the case law says. Whether someone is told there are two adverse decisions or forty-five changes whether they pursue asset protection at all. And a legal proposition cannot be established by counting entries on a list. The decisions have to be read and their holdings determined — which is exactly what we did, and why every case in our review links to the opinion so you can check our work instead of trusting it.

None of this means offshore planning is risk-free, and our review says so plainly. The genuine losses in this area trace to bad timing, retained control, concealment, or underlying misconduct — patterns worth understanding, which is why we wrote about when a trust is set up relative to a claim.

Read it yourself

The complaint is published in full, exactly as filed. It names the decisions, quotes the correspondence, and states its own limits — including that the Bar makes the determination, not us.

The Bottom Line

We raised this privately first, and publicly after that, and filed only after a final request went unmet. The complaint is now with the State Bar of Nevada, which will decide what it warrants. We will report the outcome here either way.

If you have been shown a list of cases as a reason not to protect your assets, read the decisions — or read our review of them and follow the links to the opinions. If you would like to talk through your own situation, contact Blake Harris Law for a free, confidential consultation.