Years ago, when my daughters were much younger than they are now, they came to me one evening with silly grins on their faces.
“Dad,” they said, “We have a new advertising slogan for you.” I waited. “Sign and date, before it’s too late!” And then they laughed their little preteen heads off.
I scratched my chin a moment and said, “You know, that's not bad. I think I'll use that.”
They drew back in horror. “No, dad! Don't use that! It was a joke! That would be a terrible slogan!”
And, because sometimes young people have a better idea of what will offend people than we oldsters do, and because after all it was their idea in the first place, I didn't use it. But I have thought about that slogan many times over the years.
For instance, I thought about it when a woman called to tell me her relative had died unexpectedly, and she thought he might be one of my clients. I looked at my client records and did not see the name, so I asked her what made her think he was one of my clients. She told me that he had left a folder on his dining room table, with my name and contact information on it.
It certainly sounded like one of my folders, so I asked her to tell me what was in it. She started reading off the headings of the papers inside, and I recognized it as a packet that I gave out when I did public seminars about estate planning. So he had been to one of my seminars, but never followed up.
And as that realization was dawning on me, she mentioned one more item that made my jaw drop. There was an article in the packet, which I had not been including in my seminars for at least eight years. So apparently for a long time, he had been keeping my seminar packet, and had taken it out before he died. But it did him no good.
I again thought about that advertising slogan when I got a call from a former probate client. I had helped her resolve her father's estate, and in the process she mentioned several times that she needed to get her own estate planning done, but said she would get to it “once all of this other stuff was taken care of”. I didn't hear from her again until long afterward, when she called from the hospital to say she had had a medical crisis, and although she was recovering, she needed to make an appointment for a telephone consultation to get something in place.
When the day came for the consultation I called her, but the phone rang unanswered. A few days later I learned that she had a sudden downturn and died.
I thought about “sign and date, before it's too late” again recently, when I had a consultation with an older gentleman. He wanted to think more about some of the decisions, so he scheduled a follow-up appointment. Later he told his friend, to whom he wanted to leave his assets, that he had “taken care of everything with the attorney”. But he hadn't. Telling your attorney what you want to do has no legal impact whatsoever. He took his own life a few days before our next appointment, with nothing in place.
And sometimes it's not that the person died. There was a fellow I had known outside of the office, whose daughter called to make an appointment for him. When she brought him in, I realized almost immediately I would not be able to do anything for him. His dementia had progressed to the point at which, even though the legal standard for signing a will is relatively low, he would not have been able to meet it. It was already too late for him, even though he was still alive.
So: If you know you need to do this, don’t put it off, get it done. Going to some seminar doesn’t accomplish anything if you don’t follow up. Neither does talking to the attorney, without anything more. You have to actually make these decisions and finalize them in writing.
And then sign and date, before it’s too late.
Kenneth Kirk is an Anchorage estate planning lawyer. Nothing in this article should be taken as legal advice for a specific situation; for specific advice you should consult a professional who can take all the facts into account. If you’re wondering, none of his daughters went into marketing. But they should have.
