Our Process
Initial Meeting:
We set aside and plan on up to two hours for our initial meeting (sometimes we use the full two hours, sometimes we use less than an hour). This time will be devoted to conversations about you and your family and about your goals and objectives in planning and protecting your legacy. In order to do the most comprehensive planning possible, we need to know about you and your family.
In addition to discussing details regarding your family, please be prepared to discuss your finances and assets in summary fashion. We will be particularly interested in the types of assets you own (bank accounts, real estate, retirement plans, life insurance, business interests, etc.). We do not need exact value information at our initial meeting—but a generous estimate will be helpful.
Once we have a good understanding what you want and need, we will discuss how legal documents can be designed to appropriately plan and protect you and your family. Obviously, these discussions must be as interactive as possible. Although talking about legal aspects can be complex, it is our job to explain these concepts in a way that makes them meaningful and understandable. To accomplish this, we frequently use graphics or diagrams to show you how your estate plan will work at various phases of your life and to outline the people and decisions regarding your estate plan.
If you choose to retain our firm, we will finalize any planning including scheduling the signing of documents. Please bring your calendar and be prepared to set your signing meeting. If you choose, we would also be happy to set other meetings with your successor trustees, executors, personal representatives, and other individuals involved in your plannning. While loved ones need not know the dollars involved with your estate, we’ll help them make sense of your plan at a level that will give you and them peace of mind.
We will discuss our fees with you and, in most cases, present you with a simple fee agreement that will fix the fees for your plan (to avoid surprises). In general terms, we are happy to work for you and will treat you fairly—and we expect to be treated fairly.
After the Initial Meeting:
In the days between our initial meeting and the “Closing” (our name for the meeting where we sign and finalize your documents), we will be busy creating and finalizing. If we have any questions during this time, we will reach out to you. This is also a great opportunity for you to follow up with us if you have any further questions or additions to your documents. We will try to respond to your questions promptly by email or a phone call, but in some cases it may be more appropriate to further discuss questions at your signing meeting.
The Closing:
The purpose of this meeting is to review and execute your estate plan. We’ll again set aside 2 hours for the meeting. Some of our clients prefer a lengthy review and discussion of their plans and various questions and others prefer to expedite and simplify signing as much as possible.
If your estate plan is based on a trust, we will then discuss the paperwork we require in order to transfer assets to your trust or, as we like to say, to “fund your trust.” This transfer of assets to the trust we’ve just executed is a vital part of a successful estate plan. We will, of course, provide you with instructions on how you can handle most of your own trust funding. Alternatively, we will offer to help with this task. Without our assistance with this effort, financial institutions could thwart your planning. We routinely see banks recommending that their account holder make their “in town” child a joint owner of their accounts, or brokerage firms suggesting that you waive the trust’s asset protection for your children or other beneficiaries by naming them individually as beneficiaries of assets. We can help you avoid this unintentional sabotage to your plan.