WHY WORK WITH US Why Choose Dick Terrell Brown as Your Personal Family Lawyer™?   As a general civil practice lawyer, I have always done estate planning – at first only with will-based plans and more recently primarily with trust-based plans, although the majority of my work over the years has involved lawsuits of one sort or another. When I decided to limit my practice to helping individuals and small business owners, I carefully considered all that I had been taught by other lawyers and all that I had observed in my years of practice.  My conclusion was that what I had been taught and what I saw in my colleagues’ estate planning practices was something I did not want for my clients -- a practice focused on preparation of documents, not relationships.   The traditional model of estate planning has the lawyer complete a transaction, not begin a relationship.  Using a stock of form documents, the lawyer creates some expensive pieces of paper called an “estate plan” that are delivered to the client in return for a fee.  When the transaction is over, the client goes home and puts the  plan   documents away.  Often the client does not look at them again until someone has died.  If you ask one of those clients about the status of his or her estate plan, the answer will be something like, “It’s all taken care of.”   Unfortunately, the transaction model of estate planning generally does not work.   Whether an estate plan is founded on a will or a living trust, it needs to be tended to and nurtured.  Families’ assets change, their lives change, the situation of their loved ones changes, and certainly the law changes.  A static estate plan in a drawer cannot keep up with and adjust for these changes and is practically guaranteed to turn out to be inadequate when it is needed.  Creating an estate planning is not like having your appendix taken out – something you can check off your life list of things to ever think about once it is done.   Also, with modern trust-based planning, funding of the trust is a critical element that is very often overlooked, which generally causes the plan to fail.  And, it is not just the average Joe who fails to properly fund his trust.  It also happens the the smartest people and some of the wealthiest.   Part of the problem is the hourly fee system.  Clients are understandably hesitant to ask a question if they know that they will probably get a bill from their lawyer for his time spent on the telephone listening to the question and giving the answer. To make our estate planning practice work like it should, we have completely redesigned it.  A more detailed explanation of the process that led to where we are today can be found on our "How We Are Different" page. We took the best from each of these a number of practice models and built a system that meets our clients’ immediate planning needs, helps them make the very best decisions throughout their lifetimes, and then helps their families when they cannot be there.  We do all of that for agreed fixed-fees set in advance before any of the work is done.  By not using hourly rates, we give our clients the security and comfort that comes from being able to ask for help whenever a problem comes up.   I have also joined the Personal Family Lawyer™ network of like minded lawyers spread across the United States so that, if something happens to me, my clients will have a familiar place to turn for help and find there another lawyer who works on a relationship basis with clients and does not charge hourly fees.   I firmly believe that what I do gives my clients the peace of mind that everyone is really looking for when hiring a lawyer.  When you’re ready to proceed, CONTACT US or give me a call at (512) 330-9802 to gain the peace of mind that comes from having your own Personal Family Lawyer™.