Why Doesn't Your Lawyer Want You To Have This Information? Because If You Did, You'd Know You Aren't Getting the Value and Service You Deserve

Not all lawyers and law firms are the same. Of course, you already knew that.

But, what you probably don't know is how to differentiate between the lawyer you want to work with and the lawyer you don't.

Don't worry, I'm going to tell you everything you need to know to make the very best decision for your family, right here. Just read on ...

When I was in law school, my father in law died. We thought everything had been taken care of. My in-laws had a trust and we thought the after death administration would be easy as pie.

We were wrong!

My in-laws had worked with the kind of lawyer I hope you never find yourself working with. A lawyer who had forgotten why he had gone to law school. A lawyer who had reduced himself to a mere document preparer, not the family advisor he held himself out to be.

The result?

My in-laws were not given critical information they needed to make their estate plan work properly. And, we were forced to deal with an expensive and time-consuming probate. Exactly what my in-laws had paid thousands of dollars to avoid!

At the time I thought their experience was outside of the norm. They had gotten a bad seed. I assumed most other lawyers were different.

After graduating from law school, I went to work at one of the best law firms in Los Angeles. Imagine my surprise when I found out that my in-laws experience not only wasn't outside the norm, but that their experience WAS the norm.

The law firm I worked for (and just about every other law firm I talked to) did things the same way.

Clients would come in to meet with an attorney. The attorney would ask the clients some questions and from those answers choose a set of form documents prepared for another client with a similar set of facts and circumstances and then go through and change the names in the documents from Mr. and Mrs. Jones to the names of the current client.

Then, the clients would come in and sign their documents - most often without really understanding the planning decisions that had been made or what the documents really said - and then take those documents home, put them in a drawer and forget about them.

The attorney would then send a letter that said "Congratulations on the completion of your estate plan, now don't forget to transfer your assets into your trust. We've taken care of your real property, but you are responsible for transferring everything else."

In my experience, that letter most often made its way into the stack of documents the client had put in the drawer never to be looked at again.

What that meant is that when the client became incapacitated or died, the plan was incomplete!

And, in most cases, the plan had never been updated because the attorney didn't stay in contact with the client. At the very most, the attorney would send a standard form letter once a year, but even this was rare, I found.

What I saw was that these plans that had not been updated to deal with changes in the law, changes in family circumstances, and changes in family assets did not work when the family needed them to work most.

I decided that rather than try to change things from within this big law firm, that I would start my own firm. A firm that would change the way estate planning attorneys work with their clients.

And, I did just that here at Martin Neely & Associates. You can read about the new paradigm of estate planning here.

When you are ready to have the peace of mind of knowing that your plan will work when you need it to most, give us a call at 310-697-0411. We'd love to care for you and your family!