Planning takes time.  Meaningful planning requires vigilance, doesn’t it?  How do you as an estate planner maintain vigilance?  Assuming the client wanted to patriciate, how would you meaningfully accomplish this?   Would it be cost effective for the client?  Would it be cost effective for you?  What would your continuing malpractice exposure be?

These are not easy questions to answer and likely, depending on your practice time horizon, your client base, the level of vigilance your are willing to implement and your skill set the answers will vary.

These are questions I have struggled with since opening my own practice several years ago.  I don’t have all the answers but I think today I have more than I had when I started out.   Today, our office is moving in new directions, some charted, some uncharted, but and we think that the future of estate planning is going to be more challenging and require more skill sets than it ever has.   As for our answer to the question of vigilance –  for people coming in to the practice of estate planning/elder law, my advice is think about “relationship law” and how to methodically, even if it only starts out with a light touch, to serve the relationship and the needs that arise over the course of time.  Planning takes time.