Design Your Estate Plan

This is a contract between you and Brock Law Office and E. Lawrence Brock, Attorney at Law, for limited Estate planning services, including preparation of a living trust, a pour-over will, a power of attorney for asset management and an Advanced Health Care Directive.

Our fee for these services vary depending on your selection of services. We will perform the services after you accept this legal services agreement and pay the fee through our credit card system. This engagement will end when we deliver the estate planning documents to you ready for signature. Our fee will be non-refundable after we deliver your documents.

If you accept this legal services agreement, you will indicate that you understand the following: One of the important reasons for using a trust in your estate plan is avoiding the need for probate when you die. You can only avoid probate for the assets that are held in your trust. Your documents will declare that you hold your property in trust, but, as a practical matter, most assets such as real property, bank accounts and brokerage accounts, require further action. We will give you guidance on how your assets should be held after your trust is signed, but we are not assuming any responsibility for transferring assets to your trust.

The Brock Law Office has provided a method through YourVirtualEstatePlanner for you to obtain quality estate planning at a reasonable fee. To keep the fee as low as possible, you participate in preparing your estate planning documents. We will review the information you provide only for completeness, spelling and grammar, and for internal consistency of names, addresses and the like. We will not investigate any facts you provide. You must review the final documents before you sign them, and you will be solely responsible for the final documents. You agree to hold YourVirtualEstatePlanner, Brock Law Office, E. Lawrence Brock, Attorney at Law, and their agents harmless.

The estate plans prepared by Brock Law Office through YourVirtualEstatePlanner are not for the following situations: you want to leave assets to someone who receives governmental benefits; you own part of a professional corporation; either you or your spouse is not a U.S. citizen; you are thinking about getting a divorce; you are incapacitated; either you or your spouse has children from a previous relationship; or you have separate property assets and you want to keep them separate. By accepting this agreement, you confirm that you do not fit into any one of these categories. You also confirm that you and your spouse are over the age of 18 and California residents.

We reserve the right to decline to provide services even after you accept this agreement if we discover we have a conflict of interest or for any reason set forth in the California Rules of Professional Conduct. If that happens, we will refund the fee and keep your information confidential.

If you are doing an estate plan with your spouse or domestic partner, then this paragraph and the next two are very important. (If you are single, these paragraphs do not apply to you.) Couples usually hire one lawyer to prepare their estate plans. This makes a lot of sense. If each of you hired a separate lawyer to negotiate an estate plan, the process would be much more expensive, and it would take much longer. Unfortunately, there are some risks when a lawyer works on a joint estate plan. The California Supreme Court says that one law firm cannot prepare a joint estate plan unless it explains these risks and both spouses or partners agree that the law firm should prepare a joint plan despite the risks. As a result, we cannot prepare your estate plan unless you agree to joint representation after considering this notice.

One of the biggest risks concerns confidential information. People expect that information they give their lawyer will remain confidential, but when one lawyer represents both spouses in estate planning, the lawyer may not be able to keep information secret. Suppose, for example, that one of you tells us about assets you have kept secret from the other. We obviously cannot prepare a joint plan unless both of you know of the assets that will be part of the estate. If you want to keep information secret, then the two of you should hire separate law firms to negotiate your estate plan. If you want us to prepare a joint estate plan, then you must agree (1) that each of you can know everything the other tells us and (2) that each of you can know what we tell the other. (Of course, we cannot share your information with other people.)

The fact that you may disagree about parts of your estate plan is the other big risk. For example, suppose that one of you wants a family member to manage your assets if both of you are unable to do so, but the other of you wants a business partner to manage them. This is only one example of many issues that could cause disagreement. If you think there is likely to be any serious disagreement, then each of you should hire a separate law firm who can advocate for your side of the issue. If we represent both of you, we will not be able to favor either side. Instead, we will try to balance your interests and arrive at a result that you both can live with (although the resolution may actually be more beneficial to one of you).

To accept the terms of this agreement and get your estate planning under way, indicate your acceptance below.