This form provides the information we need to make our planning recommendations. You may download the appropriate form by clicking on the title in the box to the right. By choosing the fillable form, you will be able to fill in the form, save it to your computer, and email it to us. This requires that you have Adobe Reader, which is free software. We recommend that you use the latest version. To get or update Adobe Reader, click here. If you are unable to download this form, please contact us and we will mail a copy to you.

Contact us to schedule the initial meeting. If health or mobility is a factor, we're happy to meet with you at your home. Please provide us with the completed Confidential Estate Planning Information form prior to our meeting.

Depending on the complexity of your estate plan, the first meeting should take about 90 minutes. We will discuss your planning objectives, review your financial information, consider the effect of estate taxes (if any), determine if trust planning is appropriate for children or other beneficiaries, address the advantages of minimizing probate administration using funded revocable trusts ("living trusts"), and review the options for selecting executors, trustees and guardians who will administer the estate plan. By the conclusion of the meeting, we will present an overall estate plan recommendation, including the suggested ownership of certain assets and beneficiary designations for life insurance, annuity policies, and retirement accounts.

After meeting with you, we will review our fee schedule and quote a fee for the estate plan. We will then prepare an engagement letter summarizing the scope of the work, the fee and terms for payment.

If the engagement letter is agreeable with you, and after you have signed and returned it to us, we will promptly prepare draft documents. The drafts will be sent to you with explanatory summaries that are easy to understand. After reviewing the documents, you may decide to schedule a second meeting to discuss them further. In most instances, however, our clients are ready to sign the documents after a few questions or changes which may be handled by phone or email.

After you review the draft documents and we make appropriate changes, we will prepare the documents for signing. It is our policy to supervise the signing of the documents at our office to insure that all legal formalities are observed.

We will prepare and mail to you a binder containing your original documents, a full set of copies, copies of document summaries, useful information for funding a revocable trust, and copies of any beneficiary designations.