I spent the first 6 years of my life as a lawyer asking myself why. Why am I lawyer? How does this fit into my deepest desire to inspire great change in the world? How am I really helping people? All I want is to make a difference – am I really doing that?
I agonized over my decision to go to law school. Did I invest over $100,000 and three years of my life so I could create form documents for ultra rich people who couldn’t give a hoot about the millions of dollars we were saving them in estate taxes?
How did it all tie together with my life purpose? What was I doing with my life?
Over time, gradually, it became clear. As soon as I stopped asking why and starting asking what, I discovered the ties.
I had married into one of the oldest, at one time the wealthiest, and now most dysfunctional families in America, given birth to 2 kids before I turned 30, became an estate planning lawyer and lost my dad at 29, getting divorced soon after … all of these experiences came together in the most perfect way.
Each experience helped me to personally experience and understand the relationship between families and lawyers from a mom’s perspective and in an extremely intimate way. I was able to truly comprehend how the current status of legal culture today is failing Americans.
As a result, I made it my mission to change the way lawyers think and change the way Americans think about lawyers.
I’m bringing back the idea of the personal lawyer as a trusted advisor you turn to before making any financial or legal decisions for your family. Now, when something in your life happens, you will be able to say “Let me consult my lawyer on that” and actually have someone to call who cares and will help you without billing you an arm and a leg or taking advantage of you.
You see, for the past 9 years (how is that possible?), I’ve been an estate planning lawyer and for the first 5 years I did it the traditional way – creating form documents for people who thought everything was taken care of, when in reality, the planning documents were going to fail by the time their family needed them.
After realizing how pointless this was when I saw family after family take their fancy binder full of estate planning documents stick it on a shelf or in a drawer and never look at it again, I knew I had to change the way families (and lawyers) approached legal planning.
So, over the past 4 years I revolutionized and reinvented the outdated, broken business model of the traditional estate planning lawyer.
What in the heck does that mean?
First – I’m inspiring, educating and motivating you to start thinking about “estate planning” (I much prefer the term Family Wealth Planning, which encompasses the true holistic nature of what we do) earlier in life. Like, as soon as you become an adult. And, if not then, at the very least when you become a parent.
Second, I’m spreading this holistic model of Family Wealth Planning throughout the United States by teaching other lawyers how to “do law” in a whole different way … a way that really makes a difference in your life.
And third, I’ve turned the focus away from estate planning documents that may or may not work when your family needs them and I’m making a real relationship with a personal lawyer both affordable and accessible.
Yes, we still prepare the estate planning documents that will make life as easy as possible for your loved ones if anything happens to you. But, the documents are just the means, not the end as it is with a traditional estate planning lawyer experience.
What else is there besides the estate planning documents?
There’s so much more!
As I frequently say, one day you’ll need a lawyer, I don’t know when and I don’t know why, but when you do, you want to call on your own personal lawyer. Not a pre-paid legal lawyer. Not a lawyer who will bill you hourly in six minute increments for every phone call. And not a lawyer who doesn’t care about you or your family.
You want to call upon a lawyer who knows you, knows your family, knows what’s important to you and isn’t going to bill you for the time.
Sound like a pipe dream? It’s not. And you must not settle for anything less.
And that too is still just the beginning.
When you have a real relationship with a lawyer, you will know you’ve made the right decisions about things like:
- How much insurance to buy for your family and what kind
- How to make life as easy as possible for your loved ones if anything happens to you
- The best way to save for college for your kids
- How to capture and pass on the assets that are most often lost when someone dies … your intellectual, spiritual and human assets. And, of course your money too.
- How to make sure your kids would always be taken care of by the right people.
- Whether your assets are owned in the right way to make life as easy as possible for you if anything happens to your spouse.
- How to make sure you won’t end up one of the 20% of elderly women living in poverty today due to uninformed planning decisions.
- What to do if you are in a car accident or sued by someone so you don’t give up important rights.
- How to handle it when you think you may have been ripped off by someone and don’t know where to turn.
- Whether you are being sold something you don’t need by an unscrupulous salesperson just looking to make a quick buck.
- How to plan for the succession of your business.
- How to structure your assets to qualify for as much financial aid for your kids as possible.
- Whether you need to have a pre-nuptial agreement before you get married.
- What to do when your parents need care and you are the one they are relying on for everything.
- What to do when your neighbor sues you because your fence is on the wrong side of the property line.
- How things need to change when you have a baby and how to set things up for your baby the right way from the beginning.
- And so, so, so much more!
These are the things regular people used to consult their family lawyer about and now you’ll be able to do that again when you have a Personal Family Lawyer who guides you through a whole new paradigm of legal planning for your family.
It’s really a gift for the people you love the most because it’s a lot easier for you to take care of things while you are living then it will be for them to clean up the mess you’ll leave behind if you don’t.
