Re: Family Ltd Prtnship in Estate planning

Stuart Bronstein wrote:

jo wrote: >> So knowing a professional is a radio personality is another >> red flag to me. I could be completely wrong, and he may be >> doing this out of the goodness of his soul, but somehow I >> think it's in the same class as his financial planing dinner >> meetings, which is where I met him. > I've seen lawyers charge $25,000 to $30,000 for what your > guy apparently wants to charge you $3700. It seems to me > that if he were simply greedy he'd likely try to charge you > more. >> Do good lawers need to do these things to get clients? > The law is a business, and a very competitive one at that. > Lawyers have to market their services. In your guy's case, > I suspect he learned a little and thought he knew all about > it - lots of lawyers think estate planning is easy. > Unfortunately that's not the case, and he doesn't have a > full understanding of what he's talking about. In my seldom > humble opinion.

Stuart,

Ok. I'll concede the marketing technique legitimacy. I will only get a better read on his technical expertise thru some judiciously asked questions. I think I have a good feeling for what reasonable answers would be. #1 negative if he is does not feel he needs to ask me further questions about my and my sister's needs and current and future lifestyles and ability/desire to deal with complex legal structures and potentially face Irs scrutiny. Will keep you posted on results. I might add (and it may be picky) that in the first draft of the will he was preparing, there was a terrible run on sentence, which was not due to excess legal verbiage, with which I am very familiar. It was simply lack of a period and the start of a new sentence. His secretary was doing the manual labor from his collected information, but I know boiler plate templates are used for these things, and in the particular paragraph, *I* could have written it correctly. In fact, I was the one who spotted it immediately. Of course, he agreed to correct it, but initially there was definitely a position of "oh, it's not that important; run-on sentences and poor grammar/punctuation are common in legal documents". Duh? I've always understood it to be criticial to have these documents, more than any others, be as letter perfect as possible, and that in worst case scenarios, misplaced commas and such can create nasty situations. If I'm correct in feeling that this should not have been downplayed as no big deal, it's not a good indication of the level of quality I can expect from his firm. Am I being overly judgemental? jo

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jo
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Being sloppy doesn't always lead to problems, but it certainly can. And when someone is paying a lot of money for a document, I think it's prudent to give them as good a document as you reasonably can. When General Motors was caught putting Chevy engines into Cadillacs, would it have been ok just to say, "oh, there's no problem because both engines will get you there"? I don't think so. Stu

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Stuart Bronstein

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