Need to get your client thinking about preventing estate battles? Try these tips.
Review your book for clients in blended families, aging heads of households, and children you may have reason to be disgruntled with terms contained within their wills. Arrange with an estate lawyer to conduct reviews with those clients, or ask to review them with the clients’ incumbent lawyers. Raise any elements of the wills you think will result in challenges after they pass and urge the clients either modify them or take steps to ensure any loopholes that will give unwanted heirs a way into the courts are closed off. (For example, ensure beneficiary designations are updated, any documents outlining joint ownership of properties, and all segments of the will itself are free of references to those heirs). It also may be prudent to suggest the purchase of separate insurance policies to provide an inheritance to children removed from the will. This can derail claims they were treated unfairly, while simultaneously cutting them off from the estate itself.