Trusts are not necessarily a lot of work, although there is more work in setting them up. It is like the saying, “you get what you pay for”, so if the person wanted those benefits, they and their attorney would have to do a little bit more work on the front end to do the drafting.
Accordingly, there would be a little bit more cost on the front end as well but the bigger issue would be the education component there. People need to be educated and they need to be made to understand what it is they are doing and why they are doing it.
The reason a lot of attorneys generally do not mention trusts might just be a business decision because it is really easy to do a simple will, because in that case, the attorney would not have to be involved after that. An attorney could have their paralegals do all the drafting, there would be a simple form to be filled out, they would get all the information from the client and then the attorney would get their check.
This would be like a business model, or more like a mill or a will mill. There are even trust mills where it would just be a matter of filling in the blanks. The attorney might have a will document and they would just keep putting client’s names on the forms and they would just keep editing word documents or word processing documents, which is what the LegalZooms in the world really do.
The person would get the same document that has their name on it and that then has someone else’s name on it. They would not get the legal advice or the knowledge, education or understanding that would go along with it, but it is what it is.
Attorneys are either generally not educated on trusts, or they are just not comfortable actually talking about it. They would not be able to explain it in a way that made people comfortable, so every time the attorney talked to a client about a trust, the client would become nervous and leave and then never come back, so the attorney would not get paid.
It would be easier to just give the client a will when they came in because everyone generally knows what a will is, so the attorney would get paid. There is also probably a little bit more work on the front end which is why it would be really important to go through the educational process to make sure people understood.
Trusts are actually very popular in the Northeast and they are also very popular out west in California etc, so if someone relocated to Georgia, there would probably not be any problem talking to those people about trusts.
Someone who already had a trust would need to go to their attorney and have them look it over because it might need to be updated. The person would just be looking for an attorney who could work with them, whereas the issue is that certain areas of the country gained popularity before other areas, so it would just depend on everyone’s experience and background.
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