Before a single strategy is discussed, before any fee is paid, before you have said one word about your land or your children, an estate lawyer will usually hand you a piece of paper. In the United...
Before a single strategy is discussed, before any fee is paid, before you have said one word about your land or your children, an estate lawyer will usually hand you a piece of paper. In the United States it is called an intake questionnaire: a form asking about your family, your assets, and how you own them. Most people treat it as an errand, something to fill out in the waiting room the way you fill out forms at a clinic. Mary L. Barrow, who practiced trusts and estates law in the US for more than thirty years, wants you to treat it as something else entirely: the first piece of evidence in your evaluation of the lawyer.
Her book, Estate Planning for the Savvy Client: What You Need to Know Before You Meet with Your Lawyer, grew out of years of teaching estate planning to retirees who had already hired attorneys, already signed documents, and still sat in her classroom confused about what they had bought. The book's premise is that the client, not the lawyer, is the one who must come prepared, and its most practical chapters are about how to test a professional before trusting them with the family's future. On the questionnaire, her instruction is almost mischievous: "Do the questions make sense to you? Is the questionnaire laid out in a logical fashion or is it rambling and overly long? Do you get tired just looking at it?" The document is often your first impression of the attorney, she notes, and it tells you a great deal about how this person's mind is organized, because a professional who cannot design a clear form is unlikely to design a clear estate plan.
That inversion, the client auditing the professional, is the whole spirit of this essay. For a founder who has built something worth passing on, or an elder preparing to hand a life's work to the next generation, the choice of advisor is itself a stewardship decision, and it can be made well or badly before any legal work begins. Barrow's book is American to its bones, and its statutes do not travel; every mechanism in it varies state by state inside the US and changes completely across borders. But her tests of a professional are not statutes. They are tests of clarity, honesty, and sequence, and those travel anywhere a family hires an expert. What follows converts her scattered red flags, and the drafting disasters she uses as proof, into a single evaluation you can run in your own country, on your own shortlist, this month.
Barrow's opening test is aimed not at the lawyer but at the client, and it is the one most people fail. Clients arrive, she reports, wanting to discuss techniques they have heard about, a certain trust, a certain structure, the thing a friend at church or a colleague set up, before anyone has established what the technique is supposed to accomplish. She has a name for this. It is, she writes, "the cart driving the horse," and her standard is blunt: "you should know why any technique is right for you specifically." A technique without a goal is a purchase without a purpose, and she saw seasoned attorneys go along with it, drafting what was asked for rather than asking what was wanted.
So before the first meeting, write the goals in ordinary language, the way you would explain them to your family. Who should be provided for, in what order of priority? Who should decide things if you cannot? What outcome would you consider a failure? These sentences do double duty. They give the advisor a target, and they give you a measuring stick: a good professional will take your plain sentences and propose machinery to achieve them, explaining the machinery in terms of your goals. A poor one will take whatever machinery you mentioned and sell it back to you. You can only see the difference if the goals exist on paper first.
The failure to do this is not an abstract risk, and Barrow proves it with a drafting disaster that should be taught in every family. A woman she calls Wife, in a second marriage with three children of her own, tells her lawyer: if my husband survives me, give him 70 percent of my estate and my children 30; if he does not, everything to my children. The lawyer drafts exactly those words, and the words work a catastrophe. Wife dies first. Husband takes his 70 percent outright. Then Husband dies, perhaps, in Barrow's telling, as soon as the next day, and his estate passes under his own will to his own child from his prior marriage. "Husband's child winds up with 70% of Wife's estate, while each of Wife's children gets only 10%. Is this what you think Wife wanted?" The lawyer did what was asked. Nobody asked what was wanted, which was that her children ultimately be protected, a goal the right structure could have secured while still providing for Husband during his life. One conversation about goals, skipped, cost her children 60 percent of her estate.
Once your goals are written, Barrow's remaining tests all measure one quality in the professional: can this person make the complex clear, and are they willing to? Her sharpest line deserves to be framed: "If a prospective attorney can't explain something in a way that makes sense to you, that is a red flag." She goes out of her way to attack the instinct that runs the other direction, the assumption, conscious or not, that a speaker drowning you in vocabulary must be knowledgeable. Do not fall into that trap, she says. Incomprehensibility is not depth. In her telling, the epigraph of the whole book is Einstein's rule that everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler, and she applies it to draft documents directly: you will not understand every word of a will or trust, and should not expect to, but neither should the documents be impenetrable, and anything resembling a fill-in-the-blanks binder, or arriving with blank schedules still attached, should make you wary.
Alongside the clarity tests sit her factual ones, and though her versions are American, each translates cleanly. She insists a client be able to answer, about any attorney they might hire: where the attorney is licensed; whether estate work is actually their field and how much experience they have in it; whether you are comfortable discussing personal matters with them; whether their written communication makes sense to you; and how they will charge. In her US context, licensure means being admitted in the state of your legal domicile, and experience means actual trusts and estates practice there, since a license and experience are, as she notes, two different things. In your country, the questions keep their shape: is this person licensed and in good standing with the local bar or law society; is succession work a real part of their practice or an occasional sideline; have they handled estates like yours, with land under the tenure systems your family actually holds, or with assets in more than one country if your family is spread across borders? That last question matters enormously for diaspora families and is one Barrow's book, which has no cross-border or customary-law content at all, never had to ask. The book stops at the US state line. Your shortlist should not pass until someone on it has answered it.
Fees get the same daylight. Establish no later than the first meeting how you will be charged, flat or hourly, and who else's time is billed. Barrow's warning about being charged professional rates for secretarial tasks is universal. A professional who is vague about money before the engagement will not become clearer after it.
Distilled, the evaluation fits on one page, and it is the single list this essay allows itself:
It is worth being honest about what a good advisor is actually protecting you from, because it is rarely villainy. It is ordinary simplicity, trusted too far. Barrow's examples are composites built from situations she saw in practice, and their power is how reasonable each one sounds. A couple she calls Mr. and Mrs. ABC write mirror wills, each leaving everything to the other and then to their two adult children, certain this guarantees the children's inheritance. It guarantees nothing: whichever spouse survives owns everything outright and "can change his or her Will and leave the property to anyone," including, in Barrow's pointed phrase, "a second spouse to a scam artist." A man she calls Mr. XYZ drafts his own will leaving everything to charity, competently, except that he is disinheriting an adult child, and a homemade will hands that child the argument that the disinheritance was a mistake; a lawyer's file, with its correspondence and memos, is precisely the evidence that would prove the choice deliberate and sound. Each of these people believed their situation was simple. Barrow's dry observation from three decades of practice is that very few clients ever believed otherwise, and that situations look simple mainly to those who have not yet seen the problem.
That is what you are hiring: not documents, which are the cheap part, but foresight, the trained habit of asking what happens next, and next after that. The tests above all screen for it. A professional who asks about your goals before your assets, whose paperwork is ordered, who explains until you understand, and who is straight about money, is displaying in miniature exactly the quality your estate needs at full scale.
We should say plainly what Barrow says plainly: none of this makes you your own lawyer. Reading her book, she warns, qualifies you to draft your own estate documents about as much as reading a surgery book qualifies you to remove your own gall bladder. The evaluation in this essay is for choosing the professional, not replacing them, and the laws that will govern your family's estate are the ones of your own country, which only a qualified practitioner licensed there can apply to your situation. Everything here is literacy for that conversation, not a substitute for it.
One further step the book never takes, and ours to add. The written goals, the questions you asked, the answers that satisfied you or did not, and the reasons you chose the advisor you chose: that record is itself an inheritance. In LegacyPot's Wisdom Library, alongside the proverbs and family stories, save the one-page goals document and a short note on how the advisor was chosen and why. The next generation will someday sit across a desk from a professional of their own, and a page in a parent's voice, showing how to state goals first and test for clarity, will teach them more about stewardship than the finished documents ever could.
This month, before any meeting, write the plain-sentence goals: who is provided for, who decides, what failure would look like. Build a shortlist of two or three qualified professionals in your own country, and run the page of tests on each: the paperwork, the licensure, the experience, the explanations, the fees, your comfort. Choose the one who makes things clearer, not the one who makes them sound most complicated. Then file the goals and the reasons for your choice where your family can find them. The questionnaire was never the errand. It was the interview, and you were the one conducting it.