Bio of Janet McDonough &

History of McDonough Law Firm

• Janet has an AV®-Preeminent™ peer review rating by Martindale-Hubbell®, the company that has long set the standard for peer review ratings of local lawyers who have reached the highest levels of ethical standards and professional excellence from judges and attorneys.

• Janet has been named a Top Attorney by San Diego Magazine since the magazine started this award.

• She is Vice President of the Estate Planning Council of San Diego and will be President beginning in July of 2021.

  Road to law: Janet began her legal career by serving as a Deputy Court Clerk for General Sessions Court in Knoxville, Tennessee, starting at the age of 17.  The court, consisting of four rotating judges, heard preliminary hearings for felonies and conducted trials for misdemeanor criminal offenses.  Being the only Deputy Court Clerk who liked to go into the fast-paced courtroom, she thrived on the knowledge and excitement that unfolded in front of her every day.   In the mornings, she picked up the new warrants from the jailers, prepared the docket, prepared and served subpoenas for police officers and witnesses, worked with the Attorney General to prepare the cases for trial.  In  the  afternoon, she went into the courtroom and sat next to the judge and processed the court’s orders for each case.  She was the official link between the judges, the attorneys, police officers, bailiff and the public.  Jan sat right in front of the defense attorneys and was enamored by many of the talented, skillful and sometimes brilliant attorneys who defended their clients in a most dramatic way to achieve justice.  This sparked her interest in becoming an attorney.  She attended the University of Tennessee at Knoxville (home of the Tennessee Volunteers) where her father, Al Rogers, received his Bachelor’s degree.

In 1977, Janet had a short move to Daytona Beach, Florida, where she followed her sister looking for adventure and to capture the serenity of the beach and the ocean. She attended Daytona Beach Community College and worked for a national restaurant and bar chain for a while. Then she headed west to San Diego in 1978 with her sister after getting a job transfer in a big move that changed the course of her life forever. Her goal - to finish college and earn her bachelor’s degree.

  Undergraduate career: Janet attended San Diego State University. She was the Advertising Director for a local restaurant/bar. Her last year of college, she worked for the Daily Aztec newspaper on campus while earning her Bachelor’s Degree in Journalism and Psychology.  After graduation, she secured an Advertising Sales Account Manager position with the  Daily Californian newspaper after doing an internship there and completing a co-op advertising project for the organization.  She was also a columnist for the paper, writing a business and marketing column on a weekly basis.  

  In 1985, Janet joined the San Diego Union and San Diego Tribune newspapers as an Advertising Account Manager and also became a columnist writing a weekly restaurant review column, South Bay Dining Digest – all while attending law school at Thomas Jefferson School of Law (formerly known as Western State University College of Law).  Janet was also a Union Representative as a member of the grievance committee for the advertising department of the San Diego Newspaper Guild during a volatile, union-busting time for the newspaper’s unions. 

  After passing the California bar exam (on her first attempt) in 1989, she accepted her first full time legal job as Associate Corporate Counsel for The Hahn Company, a shopping center management company in La Jolla, California, founded by local Real Estate Developer, Ernest Hahn.  She was responsible for the legal side of “operations” matters for 25 shopping centers across the United States.  She practiced every kind of law from landlord-tenant disputes and leasing to mechanics liens and bankruptcies to partnerships, corporations and business organizations to marketing and human resources to personal injury and wrongful death to first amendment right access to the shopping centers where these organizations obtained signatures on petitions.

History of the Firm. The law firm started as Stanford and McDonough with Joe, and partner, Dwight E. Stanford, in an office in the San Diego Trust & Savings Bank Building downtown. Those were the days when your word was your bond. In 1965, they moved to the 10th floor of the 2550 Fifth Avenue Financial Building as the building’s first tenants. Their story is one of a great partnership where they “never had a cross-word” during their 30 years practicing law together. They disagreed about cases, Dwight said, but never a personal argument. The joke about the transfer of ownership of the firm has always been that Joe left his orange leather chairs (which she still has), his solid oak desk, and the Stanford and McDonough phone number (619) 234-6534 from 1965 .  Janet built the firm on her own reputation to where it is today. She shared the Suite 710 offices with other mentors, the late Tom Davies, Larry Alessio, and Jim Hutchens, until she moved to 1901 First Avenue in 1998 where she maintains the firm’s office today.

Ready for Court. Janet completed the San Diego Inns of Court Trial Practice Program under Trial Attorney Marcie Daniels and later completed the San Diego Inns of Court Evidence Trial Practice Program under Judge Kevin Enright. 

Early in her legal career, she defended a client in a five day criminal jury trial which resulted in not-guilty verdicts on all five counts.  She has conducted several civil court landlord-tenant and real estate trials and ended up focusing her practice on estate planning, trusts, real estate exit planning, charitable remainder trusts, endowments, conservatorships, probate and post-death trust administration law.  She has a high level of experience with contested and uncontested matters in probate court.

Janet has now expanded her law firm practice to include consulting services and advanced planned giving techniques such as real estate gift annuities and life estate gift annuities after working for Scripps Health Foundation for four and one-half years as Director of Gift Planning.  At Scripps, she worked with donors on life income gifts as well as transformational gifts of real estate. She also prepared policies and procedures for acceptance of gifts of real estate for the legal department and advised the department on trust administration, real estate and other matters.  She trained and educated front-line fundraising staff and brought insight and expertise to the organization about working with donors, professional advisors and closing large planned gifts. She updated their marketing materials and created highly successful planned giving marketing campaigns. She drafted and managed a weekly eNewsletter to professional advisors. She arranged and hosted monthly professional advisor continuing education seminars and was a frequent speaker about charitable remainder trusts, real estate gift annuities in addition to a seminar on an overview of advanced planned giving techniques. She recruited, cultivated, onboarded and managed a 30 member advisory board of professional advisors.

But her real expertise and her heart was in the practice of law. She missed the process of building relationships with clients and listening to what the client really wants to accomplish with their money that was meaningful to them and then creating the estate plan. With her high level of diverse knowledge and experience, she can always find a way to achieve a client’s vision of his or her legacy.

Janet was a highly rated Adjunct Law Professor for Southwestern College and Miramar College’s Paralegal Program for three years where she taught Wills, Trusts and Estate Administration. This kept her up-to-date on the probate process, trust administration and estate planning.

  Janet is Vice President of the Estate Planning Council of San Diego and will be President in fiscal year 2021-2022.  She is a member of Probate Attorneys of San Diego and was a member of the Trusts and Estates section of the San Diego County Bar Association for over 15 years.

  As a community leader, Janet has worked with many charities and non-profits to help them with their planned giving programs and fundraising efforts.  She has served on the Trusts and Estates Committee of Rady Children’s Hospital Foundation during their time of expansion and during the building of the new Rady Children’s Pavilion.  She designed and closed a testamentary gift from one of her clients for $1.4 million to the Mabel Jessop Endowment which will serve the organization in perpetuity. She was a speaker at the Mabel Jessop Women’s Financial Symposium about estate planning during life’s transitions.

Janet designed and closed a $13 million gift to UC Berkeley from one of her clients, to establish a maternal and child health program for the School of Public Health.  The center is up and running and her client’s legacy is shining long after she left this earth.  Other legacies include multi million dollar Charitable Remainder Trusts to the Sierra Club to prevent the commercialization of the Sierras. Her legal expertise in estate planning and planned giving and the know-how to make legacies become a reality have brought many multi-million-dollar gifts to charitable non-profit organizations throughout San Diego, Southern California, and the United States.

Janet was the first woman president of the Hillcrest Mission Valley Lions Club (chartered in 1933) and a Lion for 17 years.  Dwight Stanford was her sponsor into the organization, and he and his wife Fern also became personal friends and mentors.  She was on the Board of Directors of the club for many years and served in all “offices” of the club.   Janet served as Balboa Zone Chair twice for District 4-L6.   She was the Constitution and Bylaws Chair and served on various committees for the district under the mentorship of Justice Donald Work, Past District Governors Steph Gurney and Len Blottin.

Janet co-chaired the Lions MD-4 Student Speaker Contest for her club for 17 years. The contest provided college scholarships of up to $21,000.00 each year for winners of the contests with seven levels of competition.  The club sponsored a winner, Michael Sheehan, who won all seven levels to win the whole contest one year. Another year, the club sponsored another student who won the district competition and $4,000 in scholarship money.

Janet served on the Balboa Park Trust at the San Diego Foundation for several years where she helped review grant applications and make grants from its over $2,000,000+ in endowment funds held exclusively for Balboa Park. She also was involved with the San Diego Foundation in other ways to help build endowment funds through planned gifts and as a Friend of the Foundation. Jan’s father-in-law’s law partner, Dwight Stanford, was one of the co-founders of the San Diego Foundation in 1975.  Both Dwight and C.J. “Pat” Paderewski (nationally acclaimed architect, her client and friend) recruited her to the SD Foundation and mentored her about the important issues related to Balboa Park and the San Diego Foundation.

  Since 2013, she has been a proud member of San Diego Rotary Club 33 and has been involved in many committees including SDSU Rotaractors, Cardinals Interact Club (Hoover High School), Four-Way Speech Contest Committee, Membership Committee, and the Development Committee. One of Janet’s all-time favorite volunteer service activities is mentoring the Hoover High School Cardinals Interact Club students, helping them learn and develop public speaking skills and techniques, and helping them prepare for the Rotary Four Way Speech Contest through a workshop process she helped develop.   She grew the student participation in the speech contest to over 30 students. She helped recruit over 40 Rotarian mentors who now provide one-on-one public speaking guidance, support and direction to these underserved students who don’t have speech and debate instruction at their school. She says, “to watch these underserved students progress through the workshops and in the end get up and present their speech about something so personal to them, and with such confidence, will make you cry.” The students are “so motivated and eager to learn and grow. I am just so proud of them.”

      In her spare time, Janet sings first soprano in the Chancel Choir and Masterworks Chorale (concert choir) at First United Methodist Church of San Diego in which she sings in two large concerts each year with over 175 singers and 25 to 40 members of the San Diego Symphony performing classical chorale music.  She also sings in the Sunday services and other special services.  She served on the Cultural Events Committee which arranges and hosts 8 to 9 musical performances each year at the church.  She also served on the Endowment Development Committee for the church and was a frequent speaker about estate planning and trust administration. She has been a member of the church for over 40 years.

  So, what has made Janet the exceptional attorney and individual she is today?   It’s the people she has met along the way and the connections she has established. It’s the mentors who have taken the time and interest in her and given her advice through meaningful friendships.  From Wanda Teague in Tennessee, to Doc Croucher at the Daily Californian, to Gerry Wilson at the Union Tribune, to her father-in-law, Joseph P. McDonough, to his law-partner, Dwight Stanford and Justice Donald Work through Lions and the fabulous women in Rotary Club 33. These individuals have impacted her, lifted her up and helped her along the way to become the very best professional and community leader. “It’s all about the relationships,” she says.  It’s about listening and getting to know the clients, and matching her knowledge with the client’s vision to make their wishes a reality.  It’s about giving back to the community, not just taking.  She is deeply connected to the San Diego community and is grateful for all the people who have impacted her along this wonderful journey of life.   

    She is thrilled to be back in the practice of law focusing on trusts, estate planning, post death trust administration, charitable remainder trusts, real estate exit planning and philanthropic consulting.