Article on Financial Planning as Part of Estate Planning

Steele Campbell recently published an Article entitled, Ancillary Business and the MDP Debate: Financial Planning as an Extension of an Estate Planner’s Practice, 9 Est. Plan. & Community Prop. L.J. 133 (2016). Provided below is an abstract of the Article:

Situations in which estate planners can help their clients through non-legal services include: poorly-invested investment portfolios, tax preparation, business management questions, etc. Currently, the American Bar Association’s (ABA) moratorium on multidisciplinary practices (MDPs) keeps estate planning firms from partnering with non-legal professional firms in providing these services. Additionally, state bar regulations govern the service if the estate planning firm provides these services in house. How to provide non-legal services becomes a particularly poignant question to estate planners with clients of high net worth or growing wealth. Referring these clients to other professionals forces the attorney to pass up on increased profit and a tighter relationship with those clients. An essential part of effective estate planning is knowing what assets the client has, where the assets are located, and how the assets are managed. In many situations, an estate planner’s knowledge makes the estate planner a valuable member of the client’s professional team. Unfortunately, when an estate planner discovers assets that are not properly managed or invested the estate planner is usually forced to refer the client to another professional, usually a financial planner. There are unique opportunities for estate planners to expand their services to increase their marketability and profitability because of the growth of the financial planning industry and the depth of overlap between estate planning and financial planning.