How funeral homes stay in legal compliance
David Nagel didn’t start out looking to build a law practice representing funeral homes, but somehow the funeral home industry found him.
While most of the legal work that his law practice in Station Square does is related to estate administration and probate work, about a quarter of his clients are the owners of funeral homes throughout the region.
Mr. Nagel, 54, is a recent transplant from Denver, where he was partner at a general practice law firm for 20 years. He and his wife, Aimee, moved back to her native Pittsburgh in December 2020 and soon afterward, he established a private practice that serves an unusual niche.
This interview has been edited for space and clarity.
Q. How did you end up making a name for yourself in the funeral industry?
A. My primary focus is estate administration and probate work. Because my clients are estates, generally I’m representing the decedents, and I interact with funeral home and funeral directors on a regular basis.
While working for some clients, a funeral director pulled me aside one day and asked if I could handle his corporate work. He said they had compliance work with the funeral board at the state level they needed someone to take care of.
So I handle compliance work, and then many of the funeral homes also reach out and purchase additional funeral homes to add to their mix. But that’s how I initially was introduced to the industry.
Q. What does the bulk of your legal work with funeral parlors involve?
A. Primarily I’m dealing with mergers and acquisitions — meaning purchasesand sales-type transactions on behalf of the funeral industry. And also, the compliance piece with the state of Pennsylvania .
Q. What are some of the most interesting compliance issues you run into locally in the death business?
A. Like, I have clients in the transport business. It’s professionally known as the removal business in the industry. There is sort of a death supply chain in the industry when someone passes away. These removal companies go in and remove the bodies from either a home, an accident scene, or a nursing home.
I’ve had some interesting cases with death removal companies, making sure they’re compliant, particularly with sign-off with the family because the body may have jewelry on it.
And it’s the type of business where you can’t wait around to do that. My clients could be at dinner on a Friday at 9 p.m. and if they get a call, they are going have to go out to move the body and then move it again down the death supply chain.
Who knows what they run into. They might have an obese guy get lodged between the wall and a toilet. The people who work at these removal companies have to circumvent all these events along with stairs, accident scenes and being able to comply with the body bag and get bodies on to either the coroner or funeral home.
Q. Have you handled legal cases locally that involved improper handling of bodies?
A. You always see a few national headline cases where funeral homes acted improperly.
There might be some kind of negligence and the mishandling of the remains. There are religious aspects that are important in the funeral industry. Some religions don’t believe in cremations, and I’ve even read about cases where a body was buried in coffins it was not supposed to be in. Bodies have gotten exchanged. There are even a couple of recorded cases where they’ve found decomposed bodies in a cellar of a funeral home.
Q. What’s different about this funeral service market?
A. These are good operators. They employ a lot of people — they’re driving hearses. They’re driving lead cars. They provide pallbearers when they need to. Generally, you’ve got a funeral industry here that is doing outreach for the community. A lot of them do free funerals, depending on the circumstances. They really are embedded not only with their client base, but also in the community.
Q. How is the trend of funeral home consolidation playing out in this region?
A. There’s been consolidation. There’s been larger players that come in seeking to buy smaller mom and pop’s [to] make them corporate funeral businesses. But the corporations are not as successful because of that servicing and local community presence that many of the funeral homes have and with legacies.
When you go in now, you’re seeing younger funeral directors who are coming out of school now and they are the grandchild — maybe third or even fourth generation. So, it is a family business that way.