listening just I think that’s the that’s the secret to success for being a lawyer is you have to listen to your clients.
You have to listen to what they’re saying, what they’re not saying. Um you have to kind of really understand what
the underlying goal is because people don’t always know exactly what they want. They come in and they say, “Oh, I need you to give me I need you to draft
me a trust.” And my question is always why? Like what do you know about trusts that that you feel that that’s the answer to your concern? What is your
concern and why is that the answer? And being a good estate planning attorney means really digging into the anxieties,
right? Why are we doing this? Why now?
Why didn’t you do it last year? What happened? What is bringing up these things right now? is it’s building a relationship with my clients. It’s
slistening to their needs. It’s addressing their questions when they have them. I know that there are a lot
of attorneys that draft documents and they, you know, kind of explain the the the big picture, but they don’t really
get into detail. And and I I really like to know that my clients understand what they’re signing completely before they
sign it. And so part of the secret of success is working very closely with my clients, understanding their goals,
understanding their needs, coming up with a plan with them involved, and then making sure that they know how to execute the plan over their lifetimes.
Estate planning is never one and done,
right? You don’t have a will in your 20s, put it in a drawer, and never think about it again because things change over the course of your lifetime. And I
hope to build the kind of relationships that when something changes, my clients come back to me and they’re like, “Hey,
we had this concern the last time we were working, but now we have this concern and and what do we need to do with our documents to address that
concern?” And so I hope to be here for them to to hear their stories and and and like be a part of their life. I
suppose that’s how to be successful in this area. It’s not a document. I’m not a document mill. I don’t just draft
documents. I build relationships and I create plans.