The Future of the Estate Planning Profession

Christopher P. Cline (Partner, Holland + Knight, Portland, Oregon) has recently published his article entitled The Fault, Dear Brutus, Is Not in Our Stars, But in Ourselves. Some Thoughts on the Estate Planning Profession, 33 ACTEC J. 34 (2007).

Here is the introduction of the article:

Why do we even do what we do? It seems that the job of an estate planning lawyer just keeps getting worse and worse. Large firms, traditionally places of opportunity and training, with some notable exceptions seem to be marginalizing or jettisoning the practice. As that happens, the number of adequately trained associates dwindles, putting greater pressure on smaller boutique practices to find qualified lawyers. And just at the time that this talent drain is occurring, the estate planning environment becomes more uncertain: grandstanding legislators drive estate tax repeal bills in to Congress on tractors to prevent family farms from going under even though there is no evidence that this occurs. States faced with the loss of the federal state death tax credit decide to simply pretend that it’s a prior year so they don’t have to lose revenue or actually draft new tax legislation that makes sense. Uniform acts breed like rabbits. Honestly, it’s enough to drive a person to become a consultant.

Faced with such problems, there seem to be few options. In light of the hash the government is making of Social Security and Medicare, many of us won’t be able to retire until the next Ice Age (which, in light of global warming, won’t be any time soon). This leaves us only with the options of pushing on or finding another job. And to those who choose the former, let me suggest that the best way to do so is not to keep doing the same thing over and over, all the time expecting to achieve a different result, the classic definition of insanity, but rather to redefine what we do. The modest proposal of this article is that we need to reinvent ourselves, if we’ve not done so already, in order to cope with this difficult new environment in which we find ourselves.