Getting ready for an estate attorney
Preparation, not advice: a checklist, a plain-language map of the documents, and a clear line around what needs an attorney.
Not legal advice. I'm not a lawyer. This describes how I prepared for an estate attorney, with examples based on California law. Rules differ by state and change, so check anything you rely on with a qualified attorney. I've left out every detail about the people involved.
The problem
Helping family members get their affairs in order is a pile of linked questions. Which documents are needed, what does each one do, what is a lawyer necessary for, what can be done without one, and what happens to the house? The risk is going into the first attorney meeting unprepared, paying hourly rates to find out what you didn't bring.
What AI was good for here
Organizing, not advising. I used it to turn the pile into structure and to explain concepts, and I kept a firm line at anything that needed a lawyer's judgment.
- An information checklist for the attorney meeting, in a shared sheet with a section per area (people, property, accounts, insurance, debts, existing documents, digital accounts, advisors, wishes), laid out so that several family members could each fill in their own part.
- A residency checklist for one specific goal, described below.
- Plain-language explainers for the documents, so questions to the attorney were specific.
The document set, in plain language
| Document | What it does | Lawyer? |
|---|---|---|
| Revocable living trust | Holds assets so they pass without probate | Yes. Drafting and deeds are where mistakes happen |
| Pour-over will | Catches anything not in the trust | Comes with the trust |
| Certification of trust | A short summary a bank or title company will accept instead of the whole trust | Comes with the trust |
| Advance health care directive | Names who speaks for you on medical decisions and states your wishes | Optional. California has a free statutory form (two witnesses or a notary) |
| Durable financial power of attorney | Lets a trusted person handle money if you can't | Recommended; notarize it because banks expect that |
| POLST | A medical order for life-sustaining treatment, for people who are seriously ill | No. It is completed with a physician |
Why online trust tools often disappoint
- The trust has to be funded. Signing the trust isn't enough. Property has to be retitled into it, which for real estate means a properly prepared and recorded deed. An unfunded trust does very little.
- State rules matter. Real-property transfers, community-property language and property-tax filings are state-specific, and a generic template can quietly break something.
- Everything has to agree. The will, the powers of attorney and the beneficiary designations on accounts all have to match the trust, or they override or contradict it.
Two concepts worth understanding before you meet the attorney
- The two-of-five-year test. A homeowner can exclude a large amount of capital gain on the sale of a main home (up to $250,000, or $500,000 for a married couple filing jointly) if they owned it and used it as their main residence for at least two of the five years before the sale. The two years don't need to be consecutive. That made a residency checklist useful: where you actually live has to be documented, not just claimed.
- Property tax is a separate system. In California, Proposition 19 narrowed the parent-to-child exclusion from reassessment. Broadly, the property must have been the parent's main home and a child must make it their own main home within a year. Income-tax basis rules and property-tax reassessment are different things, and mixing them up is easy.
Medicare and Medicaid
I also asked for a general overview of both, enough to know which questions to put to an elder-law attorney. Eligibility rules are detailed and state-specific, so I treated the overview as a map of what to ask.
Where it stands
The outcome is a structured pack to take to an attorney, and a clear picture of which questions need legal advice and which don't. This is ongoing, and the useful part has been the preparation, not any substitute for a lawyer.
A practical checklist
- Decide who is named in each role (health agent, financial agent, successors) before the meeting.
- Ask the attorney which documents are already in scope and which would be extra.
- Sign and notarize as advised, then distribute copies to the people named.
- Store originals somewhere that is reachable in an emergency, not a safe deposit box nobody can open on a weekend.
- Retitle property into the trust and check that beneficiary designations still match.
This is entry 15 of AI Lab Work.