 What is a Will? A Will is a written document which names an executor to wind up your financial affairs and distribute your assets, after paying debts and taxes, to persons you name as your heirs after you die. The law may also dictate that you cannot disinherit certain p persons, such as a spouse, under certain circumstances. Contrary to popular belief, the state does not receive your assets if you do not have a Will. The law dictates which of your relatives will receive your property if you die without a Will. A person n who has substantial assets may want to prepare his Will, or other testamentary documents, for the purpose of minimizing inheritance taxes. A Power of Attorney is a written document which gives another person power to act for you only while you are alive. People often confuse Wills with Powers of Attorney. A Will is not a Power of Attorney. A Power of Attorney is not a Will. A Will takes effect only after your die. A Power of Attorney is only effective while you are alive. A Living Will is a medical instruction to your doctor and medical institutions describing the medical treatment you wish to receive if and when you no longer are able to make decisions or communicate your wishes. Thus, if you are terminally ill and wish h to die at home and not in a hospital, a Living Will would relieve your doctor of the responsibility of allowing you to remain at home despite your medical condition. Many people do not wish to undergo heroic efforts to keep them painfully alive when they will inevitably die within a very short period of time anyway. With a Living Will, a doctor would not take or continue such heroic efforts and you, if you wanted to, could die naturally in a manner and in a place you choose. Although any person has a right to refuse medical treatment, a Living Will cannot authorize euthanasia, which is illegal. Of course, you could also instruct your doctor and hospital that you wanted to be kept alive no matter what. The point of a Living Will is that you decide y our medical treatment ahead of time. What Happens When I Die?If you do not leave a Will stating that no bond is required, the person who wants to administer your estate must purchase a surety bond to file with the surrogate That person will then be appointed by the surrogate to wind up your financial affairs, pay your debts and taxes, and distribute the remainder of your assets to your heirs. If you leave a Will designating an executor and stating that no bond is required, the person named in your Will as executor will be appointed by the surrogate without filing a bond. The executor will then wind up your financial affairs, pay your debts an d taxes, and distribute the remainder of your assets to your heirs. EXCHANGING INFORMATION
If you inquire directly with our office, you will be provided a questionnaire designed to elicit information about your finances and your family. We ask that you complete the questionnaire and return it to us by mail at your convenience. The questionnaire helps us to advise you about tax-saving devices that may be relevant to your financial circumstances. It also helps us to identify issues that may be relevant to your family situation and to obtain additional insight into concerns that you may have about family members. SCHEDULING THE INITIAL APPOINTMENT
After you have returned the questionnaire, a representative of the office will call to arrange an appointment for you. That appointment, which will last about one to two hours, will give us an opportunity to ask any questions raised by your answers on the questionnaire. You will have an opportunity to ask questions you have about the federal and state tax laws (gift tax, estate tax, generation-skipping transfer tax and fiduciary income tax) or probate and to explain the goals you want your estate plan to achieve. We also will suggest any tax-saving ideas that may apply to your circumstances. Through the interchange of ideas at the meeting, you and we should be able to formulate an appropriate estate plan for you. FEE ARRANGEMENTS
At your meeting, we will give you an estimate of our fee for the performance of estate planning services. The estimate will cover (1) review of your questionnaire, (2) the time spent during that initial meeting to discuss your estate plan, (3) preparation of the document or documents you desire and review of those documents by a second lawyer in the firm, (4) preparation of a summary, usually in letter form, explaining the documents to you, (5) meeting with you a second time to supervise the execution of the documents and (6) storage of the documents, if you desire, in our fireproof storage cabinets. You will also be advised at your initial meeting of the hourly rates that are charged by your lawyer and the estate planning paralegal who will assist in the preparation of your documents. Our ability to adhere to the fee estimates we give depends on the efficient use of our questionnaire and our initial conference time together as well as the clarity of your instructions. If you decide to work with us on your estate planning and your particular case requires additional time and effort beyond the six steps outlined above, your lawyer or the estate planning paralegal, as the case may be, will charge you for additional work at his or her usual hourly rate. If, for example, you find that you would like additional conferences (whether by telephone or in person) to discuss your estate plan further, or you change your mind after your documents have been drafted so that they must be revised, or if you desire further written explanations of certain issues or you need our help in matters related to, but not part of, your estate plans, hourly charges will apply. Similarly, if we spend time gathering facts about your financial situation outside your questionnaire and our meeting, additional charges will be made at your lawyer's and the estate planning paralegal's hourly rates. If the fee estimate you receive at your initial meeting with your lawyer seems agreeable, we will begin our work for you as promptly as our existing commitments permit. If you are dissatisfied with the fee your lawyer suggests, we will be glad to suggest other lawyers you can consult about your estate planning needs. PREPARATION OF YOUR DOCUMENTS
With the assistance of our estate planning paralegal, your documents will be prepared in draft form by your lawyer. These documents will be sent to you for your review accompanied by a detailed explanation of how they are designed to work. Please read the documents and the explanation carefully; if you have any questions or would like them altered in any way, you should contact your lawyer, who will answer your questions and make any changes you desire. While you are reviewing the documents, a second lawyer in the firm will do so as well. After the documents have been reviewed by both you and the second lawyer and have been finalized, we will arrange a time for you to come to the office and sign them under your lawyer's supervision. STORAGE OF DOCUMENTS
1. Your Will. Each person can have only one original will. Accordingly, it is important that your will be stored in a manner that assures that this document will not be lost, will be safe from fire and accident and will be readily available when needed. As a free service to our clients, we offer storage in fireproof storage cabinets located at the firm. If a client elects to keep his or her will at the firm, that client is free to remove the will at any time merely by contacting the firm during normal business hours. 2. Trust Agreements. If you execute a separate trust agreement (sometimes called an "inter vivos trust," a "living trust," a "revocable trust" or one of a variety of "irrevocable trusts"), you will sign one original of the agreement for each trustee and one for yourself. Again, you are free to store your original in our fireproof storage cabinets. Regardless of where your original is stored, however, we will arrange to send an original to each trustee. 3. Advance Health-Care Directives. If you execute an advance health-care directive (sometimes called a "living will"), you will sign two originals. These originals are distributed with two goals in mind: preservation of the instrument and assuring its availability if it is needed. Again, to achieve these goals, you are free to leave one original with us. At a minimum, you should keep one handy at home (not in a safe deposit box). 4. Powers of Attorney. If you sign powers of attorney, you will sign two originals. Multiple originals of the power of attorney are desirable because your agent (or "attorney-in-fact") may have to surrender an original to a bank or to a person with whom your agent conducts your business. If you wish, we will gladly store one original for you. Should you require more than two original powers of attorney, please let us know before your appointment for signing these documents and we can prepare additional originals for you. 5. In General. We will provide you with copies of all documents that you sign. You should review the documents periodically to make sure they still reflect your wishes in light of any changes in your family or financial situation. If a change in any of the documents becomes necessary or advisable, please call your lawyer to discuss it. MULTIPLE CLIENTS
1. Marriage. Many married couples prepare their estate plans together. While husbands and wives need not prepare their plans together, often there are tax and emotional reasons to do so. If both of you will be working together on your estate plans, please bear in mind that we can represent both of you only as long as there is no conflict between you. What kind of conflicts might arise between you? One of you might provide us with confidential information that you do not want us to share with the other. You each might have very different views regarding the distribution of your property among various family members and others. One of you might favor a trust for the other when outright distribution of your estate to your spouse might be what your spouse wants. As your lawyers, we have ethical obligations to preserve your confidences and to act in your best interest. Accordingly, we will represent both of you only on a "joint representation" basis. Under this type of representation, both of you are viewed as a single client. We cannot advocate for one of you against the other. Rather, we assist you, as a couple, in developing and coordinating your respective estate plans. In other words, we must be free to pass on to your spouse any information that you provide to us as your lawyers if it is relevant to your spouse's estate planning arrangements. Spouses who have been previously married and are part of blended families have very unique needs. For example, many couples are surprised to discover that they cannot put in place an estate plan that provides solely for children from a previous marriage without running the risk that the survivor will exercise certain rights afforded by statute and change that estate plan. In these situations, regardless of how the spouses feel toward one another, a postnuptial agreement should be considered. Individuals who plan to marry also have special needs. They may have assets and family concerns that must be addressed before marriage so as to avoid the impact of certain rights granted by statute to their spouse by virtue of their marriage. In these situations, a premarital agreement merits consideration. We usually can represent one of you in preparing a marital agreement (premarital or postnuptial) and can assist the other with finding separate counsel. Each of you should have separate counsel to ensure that the marital agreement will work. 2. Other Family Members. When we are asked to work with other members of your family, such as children, siblings or parents, or when your family members are already our clients, the ethical concerns discussed above surface as well. Ordinarily, lawyers are obligated to share with clients all information that might be important to the client and relevant to the client's planning. We can find ourselves in a conflict because of our duty to preserve confidential information provided to us by the other family members who are also our clients. As lawyers, we can represent multiple units of the same family in one of two ways; one way involves sharing information and the other focuses on preserving confidential information. We choose the latter type of representation in this situation and treat each family unit as a separate client whose confidences we preserve. This approach is the opposite of the married couple situation. Simply put, all confidences are kept except those that you authorize us to share with other family members. If, during the course of this "dual" representation of each family unit, information that is provided to us by either family unit becomes pertinent to the decisions of the other family unit, we will ask permission to share that information. In the extreme situation when the information is absolutely necessary to the family unit and permission to share it is denied, we will withdraw from the representation of both family units so as to avoid harming both clients. RETITLING OF ASSETS
In addition to drafting your estate planning documents, we also address the ownership of assets. Income tax issues and the method by which property passes to beneficiaries, whether by probate (under your will) or pursuant to operation of law (jointly held property) or under the terms of a beneficiary designation form (insurance contracts and retirement accounts), impact on an estate plan. Rarely do the assets owned by people adequately fit into the proper estate plan for their needs. Some changes are usually necessary, including transfers of assets between spouses to take full advantage of the amount that each spouse can pass to beneficiaries without the payment of estate tax. Because each client's situation is unique, we address retitling of assets as a separate item from the drafting of the estate plan. You are generally billed separately for this work. As with the estate plan, however, we are glad to give an estimate of the cost at the outset. RETIREMENT PLANS
More and more frequently we are finding that retirement plans (401(k)s and IRAs) comprise a significant portion of our clients' estates. The income tax benefits afforded by these plans can be wonderful. They do, however, present some new drafting issues and we may recommend that your beneficiary designations be rewritten (sometimes to include trusts) so that your retirement plans will fit into your overall estate plan. OUR FIRM AS YOUR FIDUCIARY 
Our individual lawyers are available to serve as executors and executrices of estates and as trustees of trusts that are established as part of our clients' estate plans. We are called upon to do so by our clients because of our expertise in administration or because the family situation would be eased by the presence of a neutral party. BILLING
After all your documents have been signed and distributed to the appropriate people, we will send you a bill for our services in preparing them. The bill will be payable upon receipt unless you make other arrangements in advance. Occasionally, if an estate planning matter remains active for longer than 45 days or so, we send our clients interim bills to avoid one large bill at the conclusion of the work. Because most plans are completed and most documents signed within a month or two after our initial meeting with our clients, it is often unnecessary for us to send multiple bills. Our estate planning bills are usually broken down into two parts. One part is for tax advice, including drafting time focused solely on taxes, and a second part is for preparing and supervising the execution of the documents themselves. If we perform work for you in addition to the basic estate planning work, we will add the cost of the additional work to these two basic components of your bill in the manner appropriate to the circumstances of your case. Your bill may also have a third component, called "disbursements," which is not a bill for legal fees, but instead reflects a pass-through to you of out-of-pocket costs we have incurred while working for you. These disbursements include the costs of long-distance telephone calls, facsimiles, express deliveries and, sometimes, recording fees. The portion of your bill attributable to tax advice is deductible for federal income tax purposes with respect to the year in which the bill is paid if, in combination with your other "miscellaneous itemized deductions" for that tax year, it exceeds two percent of your adjusted gross income. The other portions of your bill are not deductible for federal income tax purposes. Please let us know if you have any questions about the information contained in this statement. We want you to understand and be comfortable with the arrangements. The foregoing is a simplified explanation provided for educational purposes only. Each person's situation is different and can be much more complex. Both bankrupt and creditors need legal representation to protect their legal rights.
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