Yeah, the philosophy that I would say undermines all that we do is what is best for the client. My father started our law firm back in 1992, almost 30 years ago, but a few years before that he came out law school and passed the bar and he was interviewing for jobs. And my grandfather is an attorney and so my dad talked to my grandfather when he was applying for attorney jobs and asked my grandfather, “How much am I gonna make as an attorney? How much should I ask for in a salary?” My grandfather said to my father, “You know you’re asking the wrong question. You need to be focused on how to be the best attorney that you can and doing the best job that you can for your clients and then when you do that, they’re going to be happy to pay you what you want to be paid.”

And so my father kind of learned that lesson early on and passed that lesson onto me and my brother. Because we truly are focused on what’s best for this client. Each client’s estate is unique, it requires a fresh outlook on it, and so, we’re not overly concerned with billing the most that we can or making the most money. What we really want to see is have our clients be taken care of, sharing with them our expertise and having their estate planning in order so that when things happen things can happen smoothly and efficiently. And sometimes that doesn’t always equate to us earning more fees, which is fine.

We’re just truly focused on our clients’ best interests and that’s kind of our core philosophy. If I could share one more philosophy that’s important to our law firm, is we like to focus on the legal side of what we do, but we’re not trying to do everything for our clients. Meaning there’s a lot of other types of industries that need to be taken care of by the professionals, their accountants, and CPAs or financial advisors, other types of attorneys to address business issues or transactional issues. A lot of those intersect at the estate planning level, so what we like to do is a to have a team-based approach, you know we work well with the other professionals to make sure that when it comes to their estate planning that all these other areas are accounted for and they’re addressed and that’s everything’s working together as one cohesive plan. And so, we enjoy working with other good professionals with our clients and making sure that we’re all doing our part.

I didn’t have aspirations to being an attorney for a long time. I was focused on becoming a tax professional. So, I got an accounting degree at a very reputable accounting program and was trained to be a CPA and do tax work. So, I’ve always kind of liked that area, kind of enjoyed taxes and the implications of those. And so, when I decided to become a lawyer and get into the estate planning industry, that background educationally was very helpful, because estate planning oftentimes is the intersection of many other types of fields and industries.

It brings into play financial issues, tax issues, business issues, other types of law and so if you can have a good kind of educational background in accounting and taxes and financially related topics it helped because the estate planning deals with those issues and it helps us to be able to identify those issues and make sure we account for them. Aside from kind of formal education, afterwards as lawyers we have to do continuing educational classes each year. There are certain hours that you have to take each year, but I try and don’t let that be the maximum but the minimum. And so, we’re always attending seminars and presentations and being updated on different changes in the laws and different trends that we see so that we can have the experience that we need to share with our clients when they have these more involved legal issues. And so, the educational background for me is always ongoing it’s never done, and so I think that’s kind of helped me prepare for in the field that I practice in.

And aside from the educational background I mean the real-world experience within our firm, we have a very good mentorship within our law firm. My father has been my mentor, he’s seeing all these issues he’s been doing this for over 30 years, so having a one and one mentor really helps educate me on the real practice side of what we do. When you can have a mentor point out a lot of these unique issues, how to deal with situations as they arise it just makes you better as an attorney for it.