I can’t do estate plans unless the clients tell me about their family and about their wealth and most importantly, we are very specific in gathering data and having conversations that tell me what the client’s intentions are. Clients that come to me and say I want a trust or I want a will aren’t very good clients for me. Those clients that come to me and say I want to take care of my family, we can build a trust or a will base plan that meets their needs.

My philosophy is to not really delve into a questionnaire where I’m asking a bunch of questions and then say come back next week and we’ll have an estate plan ready. It’s more tell me about your kids, tell me about your parents, tell me about your family and then we talk about family. And if that hasn’t come out in that part of the conversation, we delve deeper by asking about family values and how did you make your money, what do you hold most dear? And from that we’re able to design an estate plan that’s going to work.

And we tie that to particularly when we talk about tell me about your family, tell me about your children, do they get along? We try to drill down. It’s not whether you hope they get along or yeah, sure they get along but we always try to go two or three levels deep and get our clients talking about their selves. So that at the end of an interview they don’t really feel that they’ve come to do estate planning but they feel that there’s been a catharsis in their understanding of why they’re here and what we can do that’s a bit more than saying well, I have a house that’s worth a million dollars and I have an IRA and I want them to go to my wife and my kids. Those plans they don’t need to hire lawyers they can go to Legal Zoom if that’s all it is. So we try to make sure that we’re giving a customized approach to each and every client.