What to ask a new estate planning client for

Most intake lists are written backwards. They start from the drafting software’s fields and work outwards, which produces something exhaustive, forty items long, and quietly ignored. The client reads it, decides it is not a one-evening job, and puts it in the pile of things to do when there is a free weekend. There is never a free weekend.

So this one is grouped by what each document actually decides, and split into what you need before a first meeting and what can wait until there is a plan to attach it to. Take it, cut it, put your own letterhead on it.

Ask for these before the first meeting

Six items. They fit on one side of a page, and between them they settle whether the meeting is about drafting or about something else entirely.

Photo ID for each person signing. Dull, and the one that stops a signing being rescheduled.

Any existing will, trust, power of attorney or healthcare directive. Including the ones they think are void. A document they believe was superseded may not have been, and an old trust that was funded is a fact about their estate whatever they remember about signing it.

A list of real property, with the state each one is in. Not deeds yet — just addresses. One property in another state changes what you are drafting, because it is what decides whether the family deals with one probate or two.

Marital history, with dates. Prior marriages, divorce decrees, and any prenuptial or postnuptial agreement. A divorce decree can oblige someone to maintain life insurance for a former spouse or a child, and it binds the plan regardless of what the client would prefer.

Who they want to act, and a second choice for each. Executor, trustee, attorney-in-fact, healthcare agent, guardian for minor children. Clients arrive with first choices and no alternates, and alternates are what stop the plan failing the one time it is needed.

Beneficiary designations on retirement accounts and life insurance. The most important item on this list, and the one clients are most surprised by. Read on.

The category that overrides the document you are drafting

A retirement account and a life insurance policy pass by beneficiary designation. They are not controlled by the will. Draft the most careful will in the state, and a 401(k) still goes to whoever was named on a form at a job the client left in 2009 — frequently a former spouse, sometimes a parent who has since died, occasionally nobody, which sends it through probate by a route nobody planned.

This is not an exotic failure. It is the ordinary one. The plan looks finished, everybody signs, and the largest single asset is pointed somewhere else by a form the firm never saw.

So ask for the current designation on each of: every retirement account, every life insurance policy, any annuity, and any account held as transfer-on-death or payable-on-death. Not the statement — the designation.

Two things worth saying out loud to the client, because they land better before the drafting than after:

• A will cannot override these. Changing them is a separate errand with each institution, and it is their errand, not yours.
• “I named my spouse” is worth checking rather than accepting. People remember the intention, not the form.

What can wait

Asking for all of this up front is what makes people stop reading. It is better requested once there is a draft to attach it to, and by then the client is invested enough to go and find it.

• Deeds and mortgage statements, when you know which properties are going into a trust
• Account statements — one recent one per account, for funding rather than for drafting
• Business documents: operating agreement, partnership agreement, shareholder agreement, buy-sell. These usually restrict transfer, so they decide what is even possible
• Prior gift tax returns, where there has been meaningful gifting
• Digital assets — password manager access, domains, anything with a monetary value and no paper trail
• Debts, including anything a family member has personally guaranteed

What a list like this cannot do

Worth being precise, since every firm’s version of this page implies more than it delivers.

It cannot tell you what is missing. A client who forgets an account does not know they forgot it, and nothing in a checklist surfaces an omission — only a conversation does, usually a second one.

It cannot tell you what the documents mean. An operating agreement that restricts transfer and a divorce decree that obliges insurance both look like ordinary paperwork until somebody reads them properly.

And it cannot make the request get answered. That is mostly a function of how it is asked: a numbered list of six beats a prose paragraph of twenty, a deadline beats “at your convenience”, and one place to put everything beats a reply-all thread. We have written about why document requests get ignored separately.

Using this

Copy it, cut what does not apply to your practice, and send the six-item version first. The rest belongs in the second request, after the first meeting, when the client has a reason to go looking.

There is nothing to sign up for on this page and nothing to buy. If you want the collecting part handled rather than the asking part, that is what we build — but the list works on its own, which is the point of publishing it.