Call Today

Looking for a firm with a process – a recipe?
Here, we know it takes 3-5 meetings and 60 days to delivery.

My Process

The Welcome Call:

Each person who calls in will receive a welcome meeting from our intake team where we check to make sure we can represent you, explain our process, find out about your needs, send you a questionnaire if needed, schedule your first strategy session and answer any questions about us including where the office is located.

Strategy &
Design

Review
& Sign

Delivery
& Funding

Continuing
Care

How To Get Started & Why We Charge For Strategy Sessions:

Believe it or not, I have had to hire attorneys before. I know how frustrating it can be to spend money on an appointment with an attorney and get requests for more information instead of answers. We want to help and we know the best way to help is when we have all the facts. We also know you want answers and advice or next steps at least when you come in to see us. That’s why we ask potential new clients to pay for a strategy session. That’s why we ask you to bring information with you to the first appointment. When you pay for a strategy session, you become a client and trigger that attorney/client privilege. When you bring information and facts, we can look at the real options and move beyond the feelings to the steps that will really make your life better.

Winner- Best Living Trust Service

The Squishy Part of Planning:

We Finish What We Start. We are Searching for Clients Who Like To Do The Same. When making biscuits, I believe they turn out best when you put your hands in your dry ingredients and squish the Crisco® balls between your fingertips until the flour mixture looks like peas – no big lumps of Crisco® left. When you put your hands in that flour mixture with the big tablespoons of lard – we use butter or Crisco® - the first time, it feels kind of gross. You add the milk and stir it together and spoon the batter onto the cookie sheet – I like to use a preheated Pampered Chef pizza stone at my house. Then you eat the biscuits. Yum. There’s a reason for squishing the greasy, slimy Crisco®. You have to squish the Crisco® to get to the yum. We are a firm who loves working with people who like to finish what they start. We want to work with clients who want to get to “Yum” and won’t stop when it’s time to squish.

To enjoy that smooth transition from one life to the next generation, you have to finish the work. For clients doing a will, that means checking, adding, and getting confirmations of beneficiary designations for every account, every insurance policy, every savings bond. For clients with trusts, that means getting the changes made to every account, every insurance policy, every property. For clients who own businesses, that means transferring shares, creating and maintaining operating agreements, planning for disability, death, and disaster. Doing the work to plan and put the plan into place is like squishing the Crisco®. If you want a smooth future regardless of what happens, you’ve got to be willing to squish the Crisco®. We give you a to do list. We want you to finish the list and keep a copy of confirmations for each change on file at our office. Years down the road, we sometimes get an email or letter from clients about how smoothly things went for their families. That’s the YUM for us.

Estate Planning Process

Bridges & Estate Plans

Every bridge serves a unique purpose. If it is not built with the correct height, length and functionality it has no value. Estate plans are not entirely different. If they are not custom made to acheive the right outcome, they have little or no value. Let's talk about how we can build the exact right bridge for your unique situation.

EP Stage One: The Strategy Session and Design Meeting

Our first meeting is our initial strategy session. This is when you’ll bring your Personal Information Form (PIF) with you and we’ll talk about the reasons why you wanted to get planning done – the things you’re afraid of and the things you want to see happen. Then we will talk about your current situation – your health, finances, and family (parents as well as children or extended family). Finally we talk about your options for achieving your goals. We design a solution that fits your unique situation. This is the meeting when we figure out WHAT exactly we need to get done.

The design meeting is the part of our process where we talk about HOW we achieve your goals.

For many couples between the ages of 30-50, this involves:

Learning about guardianship for minor children,
The difference between a will and a revocable trust,
The Lifetime Trust for Children,
The purposes for various types of insurance, as well as
The basics for running a company and the purpose of an operating agreement and goals for the young entrepreneur or partner.

For individuals 50-65, the process focuses more on

Making the best choices in retirement,
How to Care for Aging Parents, How to Change & Manage the Way Children Inherit,
Changes in the Role of Insurance – including Long Term Care Insurance,
How You Want to Live in Retirement – including advance planning and asset protection.

For individuals 65 and over, we change gears and look at:

Advanced Planning for Long Term Care (Up to Age 85 or so)
Strategies for protecting 100% of your savings using things like Asset Protection Trusts
Strategies to transfer wealth and prevent accumulation of wealth using things like Caregiver Agreements (a/k/a Personal Care Contracts)
Living Options – formal and informal
Care Options – (formal and informal)
Professionals You Need Now and In the Future & Asking for Help – we make the referral for you
Financial Goals & Fears – including how to avoid the Medicaid Estate Claim
Support Systems including Family & Friends
The Long-term Roadmap – what does life look like for you over the next 10-20 years?

For individuals in crisis (needing help within 5 years), we talk about:

How we can minimize penalties
How we can avoid the Medicaid Estate Claim
Living Options and how long these will work
Care for you – how long we can give care where you are now and next steps
Professionals you need and we refer you
Financial Goals & Fears – including best case scenarios
Support Systems including Family & Friends
The Long-term Roadmap – what does life look like for you over the next 10-20 years?

Surprisingly, this design portion of our process can be completed in the first strategy session. For individuals in our 65 and over categories, we often have one more strategy session prior to beginning work which includes any family or friends or a trusted advisor who will be assisting with the plan’s operations. We want to be sure that whatever planning option the client chooses, it is fully discussed and reviewed prior to beginning work or pulling the trigger.

Step Two: Review and Signing Meeting

After the drafting is done, we meet to review your documents, to check for accuracy, make changes, and answer questions which may have arisen since our first meeting. We cover the custom portions of your planning documents.

At Wilson Legal, we have invested hours researching and crafting our own language for our documents. We create our own standard. This means we have taken what comes with the software we use and state forms and we have elevated the language to better serve you. You will find that we also make changes as a result of our clients’ experiences making our documents updated to improve your experience at a level above the basic changes to case law and statutes.

During our review meeting, we talk about how each part of each document works and why we include the language we include; however, we do not read each paragraph to our clients at the review meeting. To do so typically puts the client to sleep and does little good for anyone. We review the function of each document as a whole and the people appointed to carry out any function or receive any benefit. Then we ask the client if they are comfortable signing. You may separate the review and the signing meetings. But we will not send you home with drafts of your documents until after the review meeting is complete.

Then we ask the client if they have any questions and remind them that they can write on the drafts and make a list of any questions which they can email us or bring with them to the signing meeting. The first 30 minutes of the signing meeting is reserved for questions clients may have after reviewing the documents at home. We do not send drafts to clients until after the review meeting because a few clients have become overwhelmed or confused by the documents. We don’t want anyone to experience overwhelm or confusion. That’s why we break down the planning process into little steps or bites. And that’s why we always do a review meeting so that clients understand the sections that contain the specifics about their own family, the function and purpose of each document and where to find the people who will be in charge before they receive drafts to review on their own.

One (1) Week between Review and Signing

We do schedule the Signing Meeting about a week after the Review Meeting. One week may not be long enough to read all of the administrative sections of your will or trust. For busy people, we offer combined Review and Signing Meetings.

We want clients to sign quickly after the review meeting because drafts of documents will not protect you. In 2021, three clients passed away prior to signing their planning documents.

Your planning documents (with a few exceptions) are changeable by you as long as you have capacity. We believe that it’s better to have a good plan protecting you then a perfect plan that can’t protect you at all because it isn’t signed.

Extra 60 Days to Review

We include extra time to review all the details of any document for every client. We give each client 60 days from the day we deliver their planning package to them to review all the administrative sections or “boring stuff” and to schedule a date with one of our attorneys to answer or dig deeper into any word, topic, section or paragraph they have a question about and we make changes during that 60 day period at no additional charge.

The Signing Meeting:

After the client has reviewed the documents, we sign them. We spend the first 30 minutes of the Signing Meeting reviewing any questions the clients have. Two people from our witness team come to the office to witness the signing after the first half hour. We sign the documents and answer any follow up questions the clients have. The Funding and Delivery Meeting is next and we confirm the date and time for that appointment before the client leaves.

Stage Three: Delivery and Funding Meeting

We take 2 weeks between the Signing Meeting and the Delivery and Funding Meeting to send any certificates or pages your agents or cotrustees need to sign and return to our office, make copies and scan each document into our system to create a full digital set of copies for you and your agents. We want to give our clients their plan with all the parts in place. That’s why we wait a few weeks to deliver it to you.

The Delivery Meeting:

The first half of the Delivery and Funding Meeting is for the Delivery. What do we mean by Delivery? It’s like Show & Tell in Kindergarten. We give you a tour of your binder and we talk about what to do next with each of your documents and the extra forms in your binder like our My Care Checklist which is designed to help you keep your quality of life high even when you’re in the hospital or being cared for by someone who doesn’t know you personally.

We review your documents and give you instructions on where to keep your documents, who should have copies and steps to help make sure the documents are part of your client file at various businesses and doctor’s offices. Other firms will simply give you the documents and wish you the best. We want your plan to be there when you need it. That’s why we make it a priority to provide each client with the steps that help them make the most of their plan.

We also encourage all our clients to check their beneficiaries. Our trust clients will begin the funding process in the second part of this meeting.

The Funding Meeting:

The second half of the meeting is the Funding meeting. This is the time when we review your property and accounts and make decisions about beneficiary designations and the order your beneficiaries need to be in. For trust clients, we talk about opening one bank account in the name of the trust. We take care of putting your home in the trust. If you have multiple properties or property outside the state, we talk about how we will coordinate with an attorney in the state where the property is located to transfer those properties either into a new company or corporation or into a trust for you. We talk about why we want the trust to be the beneficiary first, second or third in your beneficiary line-up.

You will get a table showing our decision and the steps you take to change the asset’s title or the beneficiaries. We break down the steps you take to change the beneficiaries. You will hear about how you can fund your trust. Here are your options for help:

Do It Yourself (DIY). This is the option for folks who want to take the funding letter and get the forms, fill them in, submit them, and get confirmations the changes were made on their own. No worries – we love it when people can get it done on their own.
Do It Yourself + Accountability Partner. This is the option for the DIY-er who wants to have someone to bounce questions off of.
Forms Filled + DIY. This option is for the person who wants someone else to get the forms or find out if they need to make an appointment at the bank and then they will sign the forms and send them in or show up at the bank and get confirmation the changes were made.
"Just Show Me Where To Sign”. This is the option for the people who just want to know where to sign and let someone else deal with the rest.

If a client chooses to be a DIY-er and fails to get their funding done, we will ask you to level-up and get more help so that things happen as they should.

Stage Four: Continuing Care Program

Now you’ve finished your documents, you’ve changed your accounts to add beneficiaries, what’s next? Continuing Care.

The three things that are sure in this life are: Death, Taxes and Change. Continuing Care just means that you want to maintain your backup plan – similar to the way we make sure to change the oil and tires on the car. Your family will change, your health with change, your priorities will change. Goodness knows the rules about taxes will change. We want you to always be ready no matter what.

Continuing care looks a little different depending on the stage in life you’re in.

Younger individuals do this not that: Younger individuals will want to make changes from time to time when someone moves and their address changes or when relationships change and new people become the better candidate to serve as agent or guardian. You may get a better job and want to review and step up your life including the protections for your new and better life with better insurance or a company for liability protection. Younger people want liability protection when they start a company or find a business partner and protection for their income if they are disabled or die and have a wife or children.
Individuals who are retiring want to re-evaluate the purpose for their insurance policies, manage investments differently, start or continue looking for help within their primary or side businesses, decide how they will sell or transfer their businesses or business interests.
Retired individuals want to know how to keep the money they saved. They want to know the best way to set themselves up so that Medicaid won’t come take it, so that they won’t have to go through inconvenient, costly court processes and their loved ones won’t have to either. They want to live how they want to live and do the things they need to do to be ready for the next stage of life.
Experienced retired individuals, in that last 20 years of life, want to live the way they want to live and have joy in life with the care they need without being a burden on their children or paying avoidable taxes or penalties.

Our Continuing Care Plans help individuals in each of these stages of life prepare for the next stage and change over time. Maintaining your plans means saving thousands of dollars. Stay informed about changes in laws and policies from us, keep us informed about changes in your life, update and tweak your documents as needed, enjoy the benefits of being a part of our Continuing Care Community. Want to know more? Ask about our Continuing Care Plan in the Contact Form or give us a call. We’ll be glad to send you information about our Continuing Care Plans.

Looking for a firm with a process – a recipe?Here, we know it takes 3-5 meetings and 60 days to delivery.