If there’s one overarching piece of advice I would give potential clients, it would be to make sure they do their estate planning with an attorney who focuses on estate planning.
In other words, not an attorney who “dabbles” in wills and/or trusts, in addition to practicing many other areas of law.
It would be like going to your primary care physician when you need brain surgery. Maybe that’s an extreme example, but you get the point.
Clients should take advantage of attorneys that specialize in and become proficient in particular areas of the law. That concept is never truer than when dealing with the disposition and protection of all of your assets, which you’ve accumulated over a lifetime.
These “dabblers” will often be “documents-only” attorneys, who provide clients with a form estate plan, and do little more than plug different names into the top.
These attorneys often fail to stay up to date on the constant and often complex changes in the law that could impact their clients, or trends in the modern practice of estate planning — and their clients and their families are the ones that ultimately pay the price.
And once the clients sign the estate planning documents — the professional relationship is over.
We craft estate plans that address our clients’ individual needs after closely reviewing their finances and goals during our planning session, and then continue reviewing and updating their plans throughout their lifetime with regular check-in meetings.
In fact, we reach out to clients for complimentary estate plan reviews at least every 3 years.
This is how we believe proper estate planning should be done.
