April 2025 Newsletter

We Never Wanted To Break Up With You…

It’s almost the end of the first quarter of 2025.  We’ve talked about our goals and resolutions for the year in earlier newsletters. Hopefully you are doing well with yours. I feel like I am doing reasonably well with mine and ours as a firm.

One of the things we planned for 2025 was to implement a new program where we can continue to support our estate planning clients following their completion of their estate plan.  We are calling it the Legacy Care Program and it has two different levels of support.

Over the years, estate planning clients have let me know that it feels like being in a great relationship and then getting dumped when we finish.  This has always felt uncomfortable for me too, as we haven’t stopped caring, but our work is done.  As lawyers we are project based, so creating a continuous relationship with our estate planning clients was a challenge we committed to solving this year. I have considered where the majority of the requests have come from over the years.  Most of those requests are for help with issues around working with their plan due to family or life changes, general questions, involving their trusted persons, sending out copies and keeping assets updated in their trust.

We have had a program for our business clients for many years, who choose to keep us on annual retainer.  We check in with them at least annually, help them with their annual filings, act as statutory agent, prepare their annual minutes and then work with them at a reduced rate for other needs. I wanted to create something like this for our estate planning clients.

[Attorneys are required to outline the scope of work they are performing in a Fee Agreement and Engagement letter and then confirm the work and terminate the relationship in a closing letter.   It’s been a lot of set up and closure work that doesn’t make sense for smaller tasks and requests from estate planning clients.] Our Legacy Care Program is the answer!  We have already been offering it to clients who have recently completed their estate plan. So far, the response has been very positive and about half of the clients are signing up for one of the tiers.  We will be sharing more information about this in the coming weeks and offering it to clients who have completed their estate plan in the past year. If you can’t wait, you are welcome to call the office and we can send you the flyer on the two plans.

I am happy to be able to solve the challenge of not having clients feel like they’ve been dumped and continuing our relationship and support beyond the completion of their estate plan.

Hoping to see many of you soon ~