Bay Area Estate Planning Attorney

Q       What can you expect a Bay Area estate planning lawyer to do for you? What sorts of services does an estate planning law firm in the Bay Area provide?

JUBILEE MENZIES    A trusts and estates attorney who’s an estate planner in the Bay Area should have a conversation with you to get to know you and understand you and what your needs are, what your family’s needs are, what your goals are, what you’re passionate about, so they can understand how to help you design a plan that’s going to keep you and your loved ones protected if something ever happens to you and you’re incapacitated, and also protect them after your passing. 

This is not just a routine questionnaire and a boilerplate trust. Your attorney needs to have that conversation and that human connection to understand who you are as a person. Your Bay Area estate planning attorney can help you define some of those values and goals, and maybe look at it in ways you hadn’t considered before. 

When all those questions have been answered, your attorney will draft legally binding documents that are going to put into place all of the different types of decisions and wishes and goals that you have, and that’s typically with a trust, or a will, a power of attorney for finances, an advance healthcare directive which is sometimes called a medical power of attorney, and any property deeds if you own real estate. We’d put all that into your trust so that the same people who you have named to accomplish your goals if you’re unable to, can also be in charge of your house or real estate.

Next, you’ll get drafts of all of your legally binding documents for you to review. And if you have questions, we don’t charge you for answering them. Some attorneys will charge you if you ask questions but we bundle all of the services, all of the costs, and recording fees and notarization fees, all of it in a one-time upfront fee, no hidden fees or expenses, and we give you access to the attorney to have those full, robust conversations. 

Finally, we execute your estate plan, which means sign, notarize, and witness. At Laughlin Legal, we do the notarization and witnessing of the will in-house with a California notary. Sometimes you’ll get attorneys who only offer virtual notarization with an out-of-state notary unfamiliar with California laws and requirements. We also do property deeds as part of our packages. Sometimes other attorneys don’t prepare and record property deeds, like the trust transfer deed, as part of their estate planning. For the sake of transparency and convenience, we do flat fee estate planning that includes the attorney meetings on foundational estate planning for mid wealth, non taxable estates. And you don’t pay extra for attorney time, advice, or answers to your questions. You can have full conversations and access to your attorney without watching the clock. We think that’s important.

Sometimes people wonder whether the same attorney who helped them create an estate plan will also help their trustee put the plan into effect when it’s needed. The answer is: it depends! Some estate planners only do planning, and you need to find a new to have the trust administered. Not so with us. At Laughlin Legal, our trusts and estates attorneys do both planning and estate administration.

A revocable trust is often administered two to three times during its lifetime. For an individual, it would be administered if they were ever incapacitated, and then it needs to be fully administered after their passing. For a married couple, it may be administered up to three or four times –  potentially after the incapacity of each spouse, and then after the death of the first spouse, and after the death of the second spouse. And for high net worth individuals, they often have generational trusts or legacy planning that may need trust administration through the lifetime of their children or grandchildren. So it can be a process where the same trust is administered multiple times over different multiple years for different reasons.