Explaining to you how the Socius Law Firm is different when it comes to estate planning requires an understanding of what the “traditional” law firm experience or working with another attorney may be like.

During the traditional experience, you’ll meet with an attorney who will oftentimes make estate planning and the options available to you seem very complicated and confusing. You’ll have a good idea that the attorney is smart and seems to know what he or she is doing, so you’ll nod you head and answer questions, as if you fully understand everything. Because you have procrastinated long enough and want to do the right thing for your family, you’ll have the attorney to prepare estate planning documents for you; you’ll sign the documents; and, your attorney will wish you luck and send you on your way.

Feeling relieved, you’ll take your estate planning documents home, stick them on a shelf or in a drawer, mark estate planning off on your checklist as DONE! and never think about it again.

You may vaguely remember your attorney said something about transferring your assets into the name of a trust, but you have no idea why or whether that was properly done. You might also remember being told to update or change the beneficiaries of your retirement accounts and life insurance, but chances are you forgot to request or complete the correct forms and cover that step.

Several years later, you refinance your house or sell it and buy a new one and forget that you were supposed to let your attorney know that you need to update your estate plan or make sure you kept the title in the name of the trust.

Your children will have grown older, making your guardianship choices outdated. However, you keep forgetting to figure out how to make the change and the last thing you feel like doing is contacting that attorney.

You’ll hear something about a change in the estate tax laws, but you figure you’d surely get a letter in the mail from your attorney if it was something that affected you, so you do not worry about it. Furthermore, you would have to dig through boxes to find your trust documents so you could remember your attorney’s name and find his or her contact information.

All around you, you hear bits and pieces about avoiding probate and protecting assets from nursing homes. That little voice in your head surfaces and says something like, “you probably should revisit your estate plan.” Of course, something always gets in the way and you never get around to it.

It is not until you become incapacitated or pass away and your family finds your estate planning documents you stuck in drawer years ago and never looked at again, that they will realize your plan is so outdated that it has nothing to do with your life, your assets or the current law. They also discover the trust you had prepared was never properly funded while you were alive so the probate process is necessary.

Your family is at a loss. They don’t know where to turn or what to do, so they contact the same attorney you used to prepare the documents, who will be thrilled to charge you to probate all of your assets that never made it into the trust.