Article on 30 Estate Planning Tips After 30 Years in the Business

Jeffrey A. Zaluda recently published an Article entitled, 30 Things I’ve Learned After 30 Years as an Estate Planner, 31 Probate & Property 52 (May/June 2017). Provided below is an abstract of the Article:

I began practicing estate planning in the spring of 1987. I had been out of law school for less than a year, practicing in litigation at a large, prestigious firm in Chicago, meaning that I largely spent my days looking at documents in cases in which one faceless corporation was suing another. As I remember the story (facts do get fuzzy over time), a partner came to me and said that he had a small piece of probate litigation that he didn’t want to be bothered with. I think the case revolved around whether life insurance proceeds needed to be paid because there was a suspicion that the decedent had committed suicide. I don’t remember the result but I do remember that I was intrigued that the practice of law actually involved living, breathing (or dead!) human beings and human emotion, something I had not encountered as a commercial litigation associate before that. I spoke with a couple of the partners in the firm’s Trusts and Estates Group and asked if I could do some work with them and they kindly agreed to take me on. My only encounter with anything having to do with estates up to that time had been one morning session in my Bar-Bri class preparing for the bar exam.

I ended up leaving that firm later that year and joined the firm that I’m still with now, over 29 years later. That alone feels very good. In that time I have gone from as green as green can be, eagerly chasing after any small matter I could get, to an ACTEC Fellow with a successful and sophisticated practice and what I believe is a nice reputation within Chicago’s estate planning community, if not beyond. I think I’ve learned a thing or two in that time and this article is my effort to put some of that down on paper. I assume many readers will nod their heads in agreement at some items and shake their heads in disagreement at others. So be it. Hopefully, there is at least something of interest to each of you.