Winsor Law Group Blog

By: Matthew K Palfreyman, Esq.

          

Happy Valentine’s Day!  Love takes work, and that work is an exercise in love, when done honorably.  I certainly hope that is true of my work, and that my clients know I care about them.  Still life is hard and so is work, but I love most of what I do, particularly estate planning. When I first started my career in estate planning, I had multiple conversations with other attorneys about the practice of law generally as well as the pros and cons of different practice areas and why we each chose to work in a particular practice.  In truth, very few attorneys actually get to choose their practice discipline, especially early in their career.  When the choice presents itself, it is more like being at a buffet, than ordering off a menu.  Tolerance, circumstance, economics, and preparedness often play much bigger roles in shaping the practice than attorney preference.  

When asked why I chose estate planning, I often explained that it really was more familiarity.  Most of my professional and personal experience centered on trusts and estates and its related disciplines like contracts and real estate.  Also, my father died the week before my law school admissions exam, and the responsibility of administering his estate and trust during law school fell, in part, to me. When the time came to start a career on my own in the practice of law I naturally gravitated toward the familiar. The saying is that “Life is unpredictable, like a box of chocolates“. However, I am inclined to believe that most of us have seen more individual chocolates in our time, then the full random boxes. So when the time comes for picking our personal chocolates, our predicament is usually more predictable than the old adage seems to infer.

Even now, years later after my experience and knowledge has significantly grown, the lure of the familiar is strong.  It is even more often a force to be reckoned with for families in merely selecting solutions and plans for an estate or business.  It is more-often-than-not the case that people whose parents or very close friends who had trust plans, tend to also want and have trust plans.  Similarly, people whose parents or very close friends who did/do not have estate plans often also do not obtain them, for better or for worse (wink).   I believe the goal should be to acknowledge the lure of letting others decide which chocolates go in your box and to nevertheless ignore the lure and make confident decisions. Because, even if life is sometimes “like a box of chocolates” it is still a box that you are blessed to be given an opportunity to pick what goes in it.  

        

*The information provided in this article is of a general nature and reflects only the opinion of the author at the time it was drafted. It is not intended as definitive legal advice, does not create an attorney-client relationship, and you should not act upon it without seeking independent legal counsel.