Custom websites & mobile apps, built to make you look bigger.

An estate plan is a stack of paper. That is the part most clients arrive prepared for — the will, the trust, the powers of attorney, the schedules and exhibits and notarized signatures. We hand it to them in a leather folder. They take it home. They put it in a drawer.

What sits in the drawer is not the work. The work is the letter we send beside it.

We have written that letter, in some form, for thirty-one years. It used to be one paragraph long. Today it runs to three pages, single-spaced, addressed by hand. It tells the people you love what your decisions were and, just as importantly, what they were not. It says: this is what we discussed. This is why she chose this. This is what she wanted you to know if you ever wondered.

The plan tells the court what to do. The letter tells your family why.

A will is enforceable. A letter is not. We have nevertheless found, in three decades of practice, that the letter does more to keep families together than any clause in any trust we have ever drafted. Litigation grows in the gaps between what a document says and what a survivor believes it ought to have said. Where there is a letter, the gap closes.

We write it with you, over the course of several meetings. We ask questions you may not have been asked before. Why your second daughter rather than your first. Why a charity and not your nephew. Why now and not in five years. Your answers do not change the legal document. They change everything around it.

If you have not yet made a plan — or if the plan you made twenty years ago does not match the life you now live — we would like to sit with you. Not over the phone. Not over email. In a room, for an hour, with coffee, before any paper is drawn.

— E.H., Salt Lake City