Six FAQs About My Estate Planning Law Firm

AEPL Q&A

Hey there I’m Estate Planning attorney Paul Rabalais, and in this post I’m going to answer the most often asked questions about our national estate planning law firm called America’s Estate Planning Lawyers, or AEPL for short.

So around the time that this YouTube channel passed the 100k subscriber mark, I started to get lots of requests from people around the country to help them create their estate legal plan. So I created an estate planning law firm that helps clients around the country, even though I’m only licensed to practice law in one state - Louisiana. Here’s six questions we often get from people who have an interest in having me and my co-workers help them create their estate plan, and the answers.

Question 1:

Paul, do you practice in “fill in the state” California, New York, Florida, Georgia, Washington, Tennessee? While I’m licensed to practice law only in the state of Louisiana, when I do work work with a client who resides in another state (take Georgia, for example), the client will work with me to design their estate plan, and we’ll have it drafted and customized to meet their specific objectives, and then one of our Georgia co-counsel attorneys will participate in the review process in order to comply with our attorney rules of professional conduct. And with so many families these days either owning property in multiple states, or having heirs or beneficiaries who live in different states, our co-counsel relationships across the country come in handy for our firm’s clients.

Question 2:

Can you help me create my living trust so that my estate will be distributed exactly how I’d like while avoiding court and lawyer involvement when I die? This is our bread and butter. Our three in-house AEPL attorneys bring a combined 50+ years of experience helping people get and keep their will and living trust-based estate plan in order, not to mention the experience that our co-counsel attorneys around the country bring. We’ve spent years building our own efficient and easy-to-understand document creation system as opposed to the bulky and inflexible commercial document systems most attorneys are forced to subscribe to. And our specialty is asking the right questions in the planning phase (we call it the estate planning design meeting), and then listening closely to your answers, so that we can then ask the next right question. And our clients also like knowing that they will never incur a penny of legal expense until they’ve agree to a “reasonable fixed amount” arrangement that gets submitted to them in writing. 

Question 3:

Can you help me restate my trust? So some people we talk to have an old will or trust that is so outdated that they feel like they just need to start all over with their estate planning. And “Yes,” if that’s you, AEPL can create your new will-based estate plan, or we can restate any old and outdated living trust plan that you have.

Question 4:

Can you help me prepare an amendment to an old trust that was created through another lawyer? Some people contact us and say something like, “We created a living trust with another lawyer seven years ago, and now we just want to change the name of the successor trustee, but we want to leave everything else the same. Can you help me?” The answer to that request is often, “No.” Our business is set up to help someone, or a couple, build all aspects of their estate plan, including a design meeting where important estate decisions are made, designing all relevant estate instruments (including the appropriate wills, trusts, powers of attorney, health care documents, titling documents, and others), building your secure electronic portal of relevant estate information (family member information, asset information, important notes, and uploaded copies of relevant estate documents), and then we work with you to maintain your estate plan as life circumstances may change. Our business is not set up to do the “one little piecemeal change to a plan that we weren’t involved in creating.” 

Question 5:

Can you help me (or my parents) qualify for long term care (or nursing home) Medicaid? Some people wish to remove assets from their name in order to position themselves so that they will only be in control of not more than $2,000 of assets, often by transferring assets to children or to certain irrevocable trusts at least five years before entering a nursing home facility. While we are familiar with Medicaid eligibility rules, our law firm has made the business decision that it will not seek out these individuals who wish to make themselves broke in order to get the nursing home care that is provided to those individuals that the government deems completely impoverished. 

Question 6:

Paul, will I be talking to you on the zoom call that I have with your firm? Maybe. My schedule doesn’t permit me to ever have more than two “new client meetings” in a day. And we are fortunate to get many online requests for these no-expense design meetings. Because I’m licensed in Louisiana, and because of the federal tax expertise and knowledge that I’ve built up over the last three decades, I currently tend to handle the design meetings for Louisiana residents and for those “across the country clients” who have estates that have above average net worth - say $3-4 million in net worth - on up. But even if your estate planning design zoom meeting is conducted by an AEPL attorney who is not me, you’ll be guided by an excellent attorney who I work with on a daily basis.

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