Why I Do Estate Planning

I have always been happiest serving people. Before law school, I served in the Peace Corps in Ecuador teaching young mothers nutrition as well as sexual and reproductive rights. And later, I was an Employment Specialist at a Refugee Resettlement Program, helping refugees get jobs within their first 6 months in country. During law school, the classes teaching about estate planning seemed to be only for the incredibly wealthy people to shelter their wealth from taxes. It did not seem like much of a service.

 

For the last ten years, I have served people dealing with criminal charges but cannot afford an attorney. It is a trauma to imagine you might be going to prison, and I am glad to relieve some of that pressure by reducing the possible punishment, or eliminating it completely. Despite my success in getting these pleasing outcomes, and the appreciation from the clients, the state did not like the time I spent getting to know my clients’ fears and goals, and responding to them in an appropriate and sincere fashion. In this day and age of smart phones constantly absorbing the attention of pretty much all people, me taking the necessary time to get all the facts to best serve my client was simply out of the question, out of the budget.

 

The first 6 years as a lawyer, I was a Public Defender. When I opened my practice in 2022, I knew I did not want to deter clients from talking to me by billing $400 per hour. My practice has always been flat fees so that my clients always feel safe and heard. But with criminal defense, you can never be sure that you have your client’s full trust. Sometimes they feel that their attorney will do better work when there is a belief that the client is completely innocent.

 

As a private attorney, I started out without any assistants, and had a desire to be sure every single thing done to help my client was done by me. But as I got busy, I was able to find good assistants who could help me with a lot of the tasks. The level of care I want to give now requires assistants who have a good understanding of the work so that any questions or updates from my clients are addressed within a day or less.

 

As a criminal defense attorney, I have seen clients with parents who passed away with a will that they paid $4000 to pass money and property to their heirs. But that is not what happened. Instead, several years later, the surviving siblings are bickering over the land and trying to undermine each other by trying to be the one to pay the property taxes each year. In this example, the siblings were also filing restraining orders against each other to try to evict each other. Since then, one of the siblings died, but the property continues to be in their mother’s name. He cannot control the property the way his mother wanted.

 

Another example I have witnessed was my husband’s grandmother. She was a sweet old lady when I met her, and I was grateful to hear about her time studying painting at the Smithsonian. She was incredibly organized about everything, certainly enough for a nonagenarian. She made sure her daughter, my mother in law, knew where the will was and had access to all the assets. And even then, when her mother passed, my mother in law and her two sisters had to pay an attorney $10,000 for their mother’s will to pass through probate. In addition to the further depletion of monetary assets, all of grandma’s stories and values are lost with her.

 

I want to have my client’s complete trust. I want to spend the full amount of time necessary to get to know them and truly serve them. Having a knowledgeable team really helps me fully be there for all of my clients’ needs.

 

Real people with wealth to share with their families are the ones I am excited to serve. Certainly we all have life stories and values that we want to pass to our children and grandchildren. I choose to serve families like yours because I really care about what happens to and for the people in our community. I know that by facing the potential for incapacity and guarantees of death in a way that is new and different from the examples I gave earlier, you are going to make better life choices for the people that you love, and for our community as a whole.

 

The way most law firms and lawyers have been doing estate planning is transactional, and ends up costing the children a lot of time, money, and heartache. Everything is billed on an hourly basis at anywhere from $250 to $500 dollars an hour. This causes both lawyers and clients to shy away from getting to know each other and truly delving into what matters to them. It prevents the client from calling in to share important life events or changes in assets that materially alter the estate plan already in place.

 

For an estate plan to fully work for you, it needs to be evolving alongside your life. If you are feeling like life events like marriage, baby, new business, new property are not updates that you want to pay from $250 to $500 dollars an hour to share with me, your estate plan is likely to fail when your family needs it the most. It will be outdated soon after we create it.

 

My cousin was hit by a car and got an attorney to represent her against the driver. When I was telling her how often I speak to my clients, she told me how jealous she was of my clients. She called her attorney daily for 2 weeks before going physically to the office to get an update on her case. Even when she went to the office in person, the attorney was not present to speak to her, and none of the assistants could give any update.

 

When an attorney is this unresponsive, it is it because they do not have the proper systems in place to truly support their clients. Oftentimes, lawyers are operating as true solos and in fact, that is how I’m operating myself right now. I’m a true solo, I’m the only lawyer, it is just me here in this office. And typically, if you hire a true solo lawyer to work with you, they are not going to have the systems in place to be able to be truly responsive to you. And so what that means is that if you work with that solo lawyer and you create an estate plan with them, you’re going to sign your documents, take those documents home, and try to follow the instructions that the lawyer gave you to make sure that your documents don’t fail your family. 

 

So, you might remember that your lawyer told you to go to your bank and transfer your bank account into the name of your estate plan (we’ll talk more about that later and how we support you to do that) but then you're going to get to the bank, forget what your lawyer said, call the office, only to get your lawyers voicemail because they don’t have a team supporting them and leave the bank without having transferred your account. And then it’s not likely to ever happen, this is another way that estate plans often fail, is that people don’t properly transfer their assets into their trusts, their lawyer doesn't have systems in place to make sure it actually happened.

 

That’s likely what happened to my husband’s grandmother (and this is how I understand what a big problem this is in the industry as a whole). Even though my husband’s grandmother had spent $3,000 to create an estate plan, after her death, all of a sudden, her family was stuck dealing with the probate court even though they knew she had spent that $3,000 to keep his family from having to deal with the probate court. And at the time, I thought that that lawyer must have committed malpractice. But then I saw that this is actually how estate planning is done and even to this day this is the way that estate planning is done. It’s not malpractice at all, it’s in fact common practice. 

 

When you work with a traditional lawyer practicing under the traditional, transactional model, probably what will happen is you’ll create an estate plan, your lawyer will prepare some documents for you, you’ll sign those documents (most often not having a clear sense of what they were signing), you’ll take those documents home, stick them on a shelf or in a drawer and never look at them again. That is the traditional estate planning experience.  And what I’ve come to learn is that that’s how estate plans fail. And they fail because most lawyers do not have any systems for regularly following up with their clients, making sure that their assets are titled properly, or even communicating with their clients regularly to make sure that their plans stay up to date. And I didn’t go to law school to just put in place form documents for my clients. Even before I went to law school, I have always been happiest to make a real difference in my clients’ lives, in your lives. And when I decided on a practice area and how I wanted to serve clients, I decided that estate planning the right way was the way that I could make the biggest impact in the community for the families and the small business owners in our community.  But I wanted to learn to practice estate planning in a new way. And that’s why I became a Personal Family Lawyer and I’d love to share with you how we do things differently here at my practice.

 

So, here are some of the things we do differently based on my experience with the traditional model of estate planning.

 

First of all – nothing we do is billed on an hourly basis. Everything we do is billed flat fee, agreed to in advance, so there are no surprises. You’ll know exactly what it will cost to work with us after we’ve gotten clear about what you want, and you’ll even be able to choose your own fee. Then, after the initial planning process, we have options so that you can ensure your plan stays up to date throughout your life, and again you’ll know exactly what that costs and choose your own fee there. 

 

Second – we have a team of people here to support you. That means, if you are at the bank and call our office to get a quick answer about how to title an account, you don’t have to leave the bank and return on another day because there was no one available to answer your question for hours or days. You’ll be able to speak to someone to get your questions answered right away. And, if you need to speak with me about something that my team cannot answer, we’ll get a call scheduled so that I can be prepared and you can be prepared and we won’t waste your time playing phone tag.

 

Third – we see planning as just the beginning of the relationship whereas in the past the plan was viewed as a one-time transactional event.  

Once you sign your planning documents, that is when the relationship really begins. At no additional charge, we review your plan at least every three years.  And, we have two levels of membership programs that almost all of our clients participate in – either the gold program which provides you with a yearly plan review and unlimited changes to your plan, or the gold plus program which includes an annual meeting with your attorney, CPA and financial advisor, plus ongoing legal guidance throughout the year. We will review your plan at no charge at least every three years and we do have an updating program that includes a yearly review, where you’re able to make changes to your plan at no charge. We don’t need to talk specifics about that today but it is something that we will talk about in the future once your planning is complete, we will talk about how do you want to maintain that. We have systems in place to make sure that your plan is maintained.

 

Finally, we don’t just focus on passing on your financial assets, but your whole family wealth, the assets that are most often lost when somebody dies because they are overlooked. For example, my mentor tells the story of her dad who had left a voicemail on her phone. It was the only record that she had of his voice. And it said something very simple like, ‘Lex, it’s your dad call me back’, but she cherished that voicemail because it was the only thing that she had of him.  

Then one day that voicemail was deleted from her phone accidentally and that was a pretty bad day, she was extremely devastated and as a result, she created a process where with every plan, we include a way for you to not just pass on your money but also the pieces of your legacy that are most often lost when you die. And we include that in every plan because we know that we can tell you to do it, we can tell you to write letters to your family, we can tell you to create voice recordings for your family, but we know that you’re not actually likely to do it and a big part of what we offer here is making sure that you do the things you know you want to do but are unlikely to do without support.

 

These are just a few of the things that make our firm different. We’re the best fit for people who don’t just want to leave their family a set of documents that may or may not work, but instead want to use the estate planning process to pass on a legacy of love and care, and ease. And keep their family out of court and out of conflict.

 

On a personal note, I’m a step mom  – and, what my child brings to this experience for me is the awareness that planning is something that you do for the people you love the most.  You won’t be the one to benefit from the plan we are going to design for you  – the people who will benefit are the people you love the most who will be dealing with things after you’re gone.