So you've had an initial conversation with an estate planning lawyer and you've exchanged communications. The time has now arrived for you to have a more extended meeting to discuss the finer points of your estate plan. Don't worry! If you and your lawyer have done the necessary homework, this last step won't be difficult.

Presence of Family

For this extended meeting, it may be a good idea to bring along key family members who may be involved in your estate plan. For example, if you've named a family member to serve as your successor Trustee or your Executor. It is by no means necessary, and some people elect not to do that so that they can maintain privacy.

The only instance where you should bring a family member (if at all possible), is if you're married or in a registered domestic partnership. Your spouse and/or partner is more than likely going to be an integral part of your estate plan--indeed, you and your spouse/partner will likely have a joint living trust, so they would be a client too!

If your family comes along or if a family member introduced you to the estate planning lawyer, the lawyer will be diligent about making sure that you are not being coerced into making an estate plan that benefits the other family members. The estate planning lawyer will also check to make sure that you understand the nature of your requests and that you have the mental capacity to instruct the lawyer on creating an estate plan. The lawyer's ultimate obligation is to the client, which means that he or she will act in your best interest.

Details of the Discussion

At the meeting, the lawyer will try to get a sense for some or all of the following:

1. The nature of your relationship with the people you want to include in your estate plan.
2. What your particular needs or concerns are.
3. Any specific health care or medical needs you or a family member may have.
4. If you own a business, whether you've established a plan for succession or whether there's any "going concern" value (aka, is the business worth something if you aren't working in it?).
5. Whether you want to donate to charities.
6. How you want to structure gifts to beneficiaries who are minor or suffering from incapacity or other conditions, which makes an outright gift infeasible.

Remember that your estate planning lawyer is ultimately translating your wishes into legal format, so you should feel open and tell the lawyer what you are thinking. Keep in mind that an estate planning lawyer has likely worked with many clients who are facing similar decisions to you, and can often help you see the potential obstacles in how you want to structure your estate plan. In fact, this is one of the best values of having a live lawyer help. 

After you've set up a meeting with an estate planning lawyer, there are a number of things that need to happen in the background. For you, the client, it's largely a non-event, but I think getting a sense for "how the sausage is made" can help you better understand the nuances of why estate planning can be somewhat complex.

The Lawyer's Tasks

After you've had your initial meeting, the estate planning lawyer will need to complete a number of tasks, including, but not limited to the following:

1. Completing a conflicts search. "Running conflicts" (as we lawyers say) is the process where we search our Rolodex of past and present clients (including business entities) and other relationships to make sure that there's no "conflict of interest". This can become a tricky subject, but basically, the lawyer wants to make sure that he or she can fully represent your best interests, and if you have issues that conflict with the issues of a past or present client of the estate planning lawyer, then he or she may not be able to represent you without obtaining a waiver from you and that other past or present client. Don't worry too much here--the lawyer will let you know if there's a problem.
2. Completing an Engagement Letter. Every lawyer should be sending you an engagement letter, which is simply a contract that specifies your rights with respect to the work that the lawyer will do for you. The letter should also contain specifics of the fees involved. A recent trend is for lawyers to sending these agreements in electronic form which you can then sign by "e-signature".
3. Additional questions. The estate planning lawyer may have a worksheet with additional information for you to fill out. If there are relatively little gaps to fill after your initial contact with the lawyer, it may be a short e-mail with a bullet point list of additional details that the lawyer seeks to obtain. 

If your situation poses an issue that needs to be researched, the estate planning lawyer may also spend some time reviewing the law to ensure that he or she is providing you sound advice (but more often than not, the lawyer will be well-versed in the laws that affect your situation).

You may have gone your entire life never needing to hire, much less, interact with a lawyer, so it it's no surprise that you might not know exactly what to expect. In this next series of blog posts, my goal is to layout the general process of working with an estate planning lawyer. Hopefully, by understanding the basics, you will feel more comfortable about starting the important process for yourself and your family.

First Contact

As with any professional engagement, you will be calling or e-mailing the estate planning lawyer to find out about how he or she can help you. You might find your attorney in any number of ways, for example, through a general Google search, via Yelp, or specialized lawyer websites such as avvo.com. Whatever the avenue may be, you will be the one reaching out to the estate planning lawyer initially (for a number of reasons, a lawyer is unlikely to be the one "cold-calling" you to sell you services).

Details to Discuss

During your first call, there are a few general objectives you and the lawyer will have. Here are some of them:

1. Find out whether you get good "vibes" from each other. Simply stated, do you feel confident that the lawyer knows what he or she is doing and vice versa; the lawyer will be assessing whether his or her skill set will be adequate to handle your situation.
2. Specifics of what working with this estate planning lawyer is like. This would include details such as: (1) whether e-mail, physical letters, or phone calls are the best form of contact [note: many older estate planning lawyers rely heavily on physical mail rather than e-mail]; (2) what the lawyer's fee arrangement is [for example, you may discuss the amount of the retainer required and whether the lawyer charges by the hour or charges a flat rate; you can even ask about what a cost estimate would be for your estate plan]; (3) the timeline for completion of the estate planning documents [to some degree, this will also depend on how quickly you will be able to make decisions regarding your plan, but outside of this, the lawyer should be able to give you a good estimate].
3. Information that will be helpful to the estate planning lawyer. To make your engagement go as smoothly as possible, it's a good idea to have the following information ready (preferably in a Word document or in an e-mail ready for whichever lawyer you ultimately decide to use): (1) personal information of you and your family, including name, address, phone number, e-mail address; (2) your family situation, for example, whether you have children from a prior marriage or your divorced, etc.; (3) copies of existing estate planning documents that you may have; (4) a list of your assets and the approximate value of each asset.

Setting a Meeting Date

After you've exchanged pleasantries and details about your estate planning situation, the lawyer or his or her assistant will often book a time to meet with you in person to go over the structuring of your estate plan. The estate planning lawyer may also send you a separate e-mail or questionnaire of additional questions to help the two of you have a productive meeting to discuss the finer details of your estate plan. (There is some homework for the lawyer to do, which I will discuss in the next blog post.)

So, there you have it, the first contact with your estate planning lawyer in a nutshell.

Many people get tripped up on the steps that need to be taken after an estate plan has been set up. For those with simple estates, there may not be much to do after meeting with the estate planning lawyer to sign the documents. For others, additional steps need to be taken to ensure that the estate plan will be fully functional once they become disabled or pass away.

Wills

If your estate plan utilizes a Will as the primary tool to transfer your assets, you're basically done after it's been signed and witnessed. You might have assets that are held as joint tenants that need to be updated or beneficiary designations on assets such as life insurance policies and/or retirement accounts that may need to be revised, but generally speaking there's not too much ongoing maintenance. (Although it is still good to periodically review your Will to make sure that you are distributing your assets to the appropriate people or organizations in your life.)

Revocable Living Trusts

Re-titling Assets

If your estate plan utilizes a Revocable Living Trust, then there are still additional steps that need to be taken to ensure that the trust is what governs the use and transfer of your assets. The primary focus here is on ensuring that assets (other than those that utilize beneficiary designations such as life insurance policies or retirement accounts) are re-titled in the name of the trust. Usually, this means that your property, which you might have previously owned as "John Doe, a single man" will now be owned as "John Doe, as Trustee of the John Doe Living Trust dated January 1, 2018". You will want to change the title to bank accounts, brokerage accounts, real estate, interests in any business entities (e.g., stock or membership interests in an LLC) accordingly. You will also want to revise the beneficiary designations on life insurance policies and/or retirement accounts. 

Beneficiary Designations

For life insurance policies, we generally recommend listing your trust as the primary beneficiary, the idea being that the proceeds from the policy should be distributed in accordance with the wishes stated in your trust. For retirement accounts, spouses will often name each other as the primary beneficiary, and then name their trust as the secondary beneficiary. The purpose for the different approach here is that the law allows for surviving spouses to convert retirement accounts for which they are beneficiaries into a "spousal rollover IRA", which then permits the spouse to continue tax-deferred growth of the retirement account. The trust is named as a secondary beneficiary so that the retirement account can escape probate after the surviving spouse passes away. Single individuals may name their trust directly as a primary beneficiary.

Business as Usual

Making sure that assets are re-titled in the name of the trust and that appropriate beneficiary designations are updated, can be the most time-consuming and frankly annoying part of the estate planning process. After it's done, there's generally no difference in how you live your day-to-day life, and things such as income tax returns and other obligations continue to be the same as they were before you created your estate planning documents.