Avoiding Probate

Probate is going to court to have the title to your assets, especially land, transferred to your heirs.  A Will doesn’t do this; it just tells the court who gets what. The average probate takes 12 -18 months and costs $3,000 to $7,000, and sometimes a lot more than that. During the probate a document called the Inventory gets filed, which makes public every asset you own at the time of your death.

Historically, estate lawyers made their living selling cheap simple wills to clients, built file drawers full of Wills, and then, when the client died, probated the will.  Little effort was put into planning.  This has been an acceptable business model for decades, and many attorneys feel “If it ain’t broke why fix it?”

Modern estate planning lawyers believe the old way is broken, and that by planning ahead clients can remove from their estate planning all the bad things about probate.

We help clients by:

• providing the right estate planning documents at a set price agreed upon in advance;
• preparing an estate plan that quickly and efficiently distributes assets to heirs, which also helps reduce the cost to settle an estate; and
• making sure that the entire process is privileged and confidential.

Instead of the old way, we say let’s do things the right way.