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About Envoy
When these three women reunited at a high school event, they realized their unique professional backgrounds aligned perfectly to create Envoy Private Fiduciary. With integrity, character, and dedication, we are a true team, working together, to ensure that your affairs are handled in a way to honor your wishes.
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We know that every person, every family, and every estate is unique. Our vast experience includes handling real estate portfolios, museum-quality antiquities, rare books, historical and modern artwork, couture personal property, jewelry, medical practice unwinding, and more. We understand that family dynamics can be difficult, we bring calm, rational equilibrium to minimize conflict and achieve resolution. That said, should conflicts arise, we are extremely well positioned to face those challenges to protect you, your estate, and your beneficiaries.
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As an Envoy client, you, your loved ones, and the estate you’ve spent a lifetime creating will receive the highest quality of attention and support whether your estate is modest or substantial, straightforward or elaborate.
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Our mission is to provide a personal, comprehensive commitment to ensuring your short and long term plans are respectfully fulfilled.
Meet the Team
The Team at Envoy offers decades of experience in the legal, financial, healthcare, and special needs industries. When you need someone to handle your affairs while honoring your wishes, we get things done.
Deana La Barbera
Founder and California Licensed Professional Fiduciary
Deana was born in Santa Monica, CA and raised in the San Fernando Valley. With two older brothers in a Sicilian home, needless to say, her tenacity emerged early on. Having grown up in the restaurant business, La Barbera’s on Wilshire, Deana’s family focus, work ethic, and business acumen have guided her personal and professional life.
While earning her BA in Psychology from California Lutheran University, Deana worked as a part-time teller at Cal Fed Bank (remember them?). That part-time college job resulted in her becoming a licensed securities rep, and lead to her first career as a stockbroker with Shearson Lehman Brothers (remember them, too?). Her securities industry training was in New York with Lehman Brothers, but her sense of justice and childhood dream of becoming a lawyer pulled her out of that world and into Pepperdine University School of Law where she earned her J.D, magna cum laude. Building on her securities foundation, Deana moved to Washington, D.C. to work for the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. While there, she earned an LL.M. (Master of Laws) in Securities and Financial Regulation from the Georgetown Law Center, where she graduated with distinction.
A quarter-century of legal experience has allowed Deana to focus on broad, but interrelated, practice areas including securities regulation, general counsel, real estate, and trusts and estates. It is this last area of law that took on a primary focus, and what led her to found Envoy Private Fiduciary. While searching for effective and efficient asset managers for her clients when planning for difficult times of life and after death, Deana saw first-hand the shortage of effective and efficient professionals in the fiduciary industry.
Deana said, “I envisaged a practice that would provide the services that our team would want for ourselves and our families throughout our lives and after.” Our team at Envoy is the perfect convergence of expertise to fill this need in our community.
Susan Baukus
Principal
Susan is East Coast born with a Southern California education and Midwest values. She has built her career saying yes when interesting opportunities arise: from taking young adults who have special needs to Dodger games, camping in the Florida Keys with children who have autism and their siblings, to taking adults who have developmental disabilities on their first vacation. Susan understands the importance of family and the unique family dynamics that make end of life planning difficult.
Susan gets results where no one else has succeeded. She has served as an expert witness in family court and at fair hearings. She has spoken at local, national, and international conferences presenting her research and sharing her experience. An award winning advocate, Susan co-founded an organization with community leaders to offer presentations on topics of importance for people who have special needs, their families, teachers, and other support and service providers.
Susan comes to the private fiduciary world with a broad knowledge of government, social, and community-based services; three decades of working with people of all ages, people who have special needs, those who love and support them, those who provide services, and those who have the power to say yes or no; and a working knowledge of creating and employing Special Needs Trusts.
Susan says, “It is an honor to work with families, to help them prepare for some of the most difficult experiences that we all have as we deal with the loss of a loved one.”
Teal LeVine
Principal
"Having grown up in a household of nine (seven siblings, a conservative mother and adventurous art professor father), I learned how to navigate through tough family decisions and negotiations at a very young age."
Teal's dynamic family traveled Europe, championed early and extended education, debated, negotiated, and achieved their goals in a loving way. Teal earned her BA in English from UCSB, and later earned her Degree in Physical Therapy from Chicago Medical School Rosalind Franklin University. Upon honing her skills in pediatrics, wound care, skilled nursing, and long-term care with emphasis on acute pulmonary conditions, Teal settled in Manhattan Beach and started her own family.
As every mom knows, Teal became an expert multi-tasker getting school, sports, carpools, Girl Scouts, karate, dance, skating for hockey (WHAT was she thinking?) and piano all calendared and reasonably well attended. Unbeknownst to her, this was training for her role at Envoy as the logistics specialist, organizing timelines, keeping projects rolling smoothly, itemizing the tangible household items with a keen eye for valuation, assessing appropriateness for auction or donation, and to organize family history with integrity, dignity and respect.
Teal brings expertise in a multitude of complex family dynamics, and a deep understanding of the physical needs of an individual and the impact these needs place on a family. Teal’s decades of PT work have cemented her ability to quickly assess situations, formulate clear plans of action, and utilize critical interpersonal skills to bring projects to fruition with compassion, humor, and professional aplomb.