Our Estate Planning Process

Here at Nielsen Law, we have a really set estate planning process, which are the steps that you'll go through to complete your estate plan. It begins with an initial consultation where we get to know you, get to understand your family and your financial information. We'll kind of walk through the estate planning process so you know exactly what to expect.

And then at the end of that initial consultation, we'll kind of talk about pricing and then also talk about what the next steps are. If you decide that you want to move forward with our firm, then we'll move into what we call the design phase. And usually this comes just right after that initial consultation, all in one big, long meeting.

And during the design phase, we'll go through a whole series of questions with you about how you want your estate plan to be set up, who you want to be charge, who your beneficiaries are. We'll help plan for incapacity as well with both financial and medical decisions. At the conclusion of that design phase, then.

And now it's our turn, we will begin drafting all of your documents. We usually have a team of attorneys and paralegals that help with drafting the estate plan documents. And then the next time we would see you would be to review all of those documents together. So we have sort of a whole meeting where we'll go through each of the documents just to make sure that you really understand them, that they're set up the way that you expected them to be.

And then once we figure out that everything looks good or we make revisions if we need to, we'll arrange a time for you to sign all of the documents. After signing, we enter into a really important stage called asset alignment. And this is where we make sure that your beneficiary designations are updated to coordinate with your estate plan, and also that all of your bank accounts and investment accounts and other assets are titled correctly.

After that, we enter into what we call maintenance, and we have most of our clients on an annual client maintenance plan called the Peace of Mind Protection plan. And really the goal of that plan is just to make sure that your estate plan is going to work when it's needed. So it includes some annual reports of how things are set up and then also most of the routine types of updates that our clients need to make.