Category: Work

Natalie Choate on the CARES Act
Helping Clients Navigate Two New Planning Scenarios
Natalie Choate is a reknowned expert on tax planning. She practices law in Boston, Massachusetts, with the firm of Nutter McClennen & Fish, LLP. Her practice is limited to consultations on estate planning for retirement benefits.
Natalie’s books, Life and Death Planning for Retirement Benefits and The QPRT Manual are leading resources for estate planning professionals.
Join Natalie Choate for a discussion of the new CARES Act, which impacts retirement benefits in two important ways—minimum distributions are “cancelled” for 2020,
and special tax breaks are permitted for Coronavirus-related distributions.
PLEASE NOTE: InterActive Legal subscribers can access this recording FREE on the InterActive Legal Subscriber website.
Visit Interactive Legal, for more information.
In this webinar, Natalie addresses these important topics
Minimum Distributions Cancelled for 2020
- How the suspension of 2020 minimum distributions works, mechanically
- Special rules for deferred 2019 RMDs and 5-year rule payouts
- The impact on DB plans and annuities
- The effect on QCDs – is it time to do Roth conversions?
- What about people who already took their 2020 RMD – they can “roll it back in,” but…
- What about the 60 day deadline?…the once per 12 months limit?
- What if the person took monthly payouts, or made QCDs….or DIED?
Special Tax Breaks for Corona-virus Related Distributions
- Definition of “CRD”
- No 10% tax for those under age 59.5
- $100,000 maximum
- Pay the tax over 3 years, or…
- Roll it back IN within 3 years.
Don’t miss this opportunity to hear from the expert in this challenging area that impacts clients of all levels of wealth.
May 28, 2020
The Legacy Project is more than Estate Planning
The principles of The Legacy Project believe that Estate Planning is dead—and paint a new vision for the industry
Our lives are more than our portfolios. Wealth Management doesn’t mean diddly, if it divides your family and sets them up for failure. We need a new way of thinking, to build value for our clients in a rapidly changing world.
Wealth for it’s own sake is not enough. If we fail to instill our values in our children, and if we’re not teaching the lessons we’ve learned, then we need a course change.
The Legacy Project
We recently built a website for a group of Estate Planners and Financial Advisors, with an interesting take on Estate Planning.
Community, Conversation and Collaboration is the key.
We’re more than the sum of our parts.
Legacy Planning is more than a kinder-gentler take on wealth management. It’s rethinking the goal. If estate planning is meant to protect assets for future generations, and if our heirs are losing the ground we’ve paved for them, then we need to better understand the equation. And we can’t do that alone, in a vacuum.
Where there is no wise guidance, the nation falls,but in the multitude of counselors there is victory. – Proverbs 11:14
To discern why traditional estate planning is losing ground, we’re gathering the best and brightest, building a community that gets at the heart of the problem.
Daniel Scott, Chad Reyes , and Jonathan Blattmacher have a plan for a better way to manage estates, focused on your legacy. Legacy Planning is more that wealth. It’s wealth management focused on improving the lives of your heirs.
Dan Scott is the Founder and Principal of Scott Law, where he focuses on legacy planning for individuals, families and businesses. He is also the co-Founder and CEO of Spotlight Advisory Group, a wealth and legacy management firm designed for artists, entertainers, athletes, influencers and other creatives
Chad Reyes is the President & CEO of Wealth and Legacy Group. For nearly 2 decades, Chad and his firm have coached, consulted and guided highly successful entrepreneurs, industry leaders and generational families to tax efficiently create, protect and transfer their wealth to future generations through the utilization of their L.O.V.E. Based Approach.
Jonathan Blattmachr is recognized as one of the most creative trusts and estates lawyers in the country. Among industry accolades, he is Director of Estate Planning at Peak Trust Company, InterActive Legal, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, and Co-Author of Wealth Transfer Planning™.
Become a part of this effort, visit The Legacy Project.
May 15, 2020
Life and Death Planning for Retirement Benefits
Planning for retirement is not as simple as you’d think. We’ve discovered an amazing book, the definitive reference book helping you plan and manage benefits for retirement for you or someone close.
Natalie Choate, renowned in the estate planning and elder law world, has update her landmark book, Life and Death Planning for Retirement Benefits. This 8th Edition was recently released in 2019 and an update is due in 2020.
Click here to purchase the physical book.

Or you can subscribe to the Digital Version. Click this button and visit RetirementBenefitsPlanning.com
Retirement Benefits Planning
January 13, 2020
Is your website ADA Compliant?
An Abrupt Change in ADA Compliance Renders your Practice Vulnerable
With the recent changes in Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) compliance opening up the floodgates for litigation, it is important now more than ever to understand what changes occurred, and how you can protect your firm from the rising tide of lawsuits.
Can the sight impaired access your site? Always keep your users in mind.
On January 15, 2019, the initial ruling made in the soon-to-be-landmark case Robles v. Domino’s Pizza, Inc, was reversed, now stating that,
“Even though customers primarily accessed the website and app away from Domino’s physical restaurants, the panel stated that the ADA applies to the services of a public accommodation, not services in a place of public accommodation. The panel stated that the website and app connected customers to the goods and services of Domino’s physical restaurants.”
This means that websites and apps connected to a service who were initially governed by ADA Title I—which dealt with accessibility during the employment process—are now also governed by ADA Title III, which,
“prohibits discrimination on the basis of disability by covered public accommodations and requires places of public accommodation* and commercial facilities to be designed, constructed, and altered in compliance with the accessibility standards established by this part.”
Already, this new ruling has proved problematic to many, many high-profile businesses and entities, including Target.com, Netflix, Major League Baseball, and even colleges such as Harvard University. It is imperative for lawyers to understand this ruling, and to quickly have their websites in compliance with Title III accessibility requirements** lest their firms face rapidly approaching litigation.
Accessibility solutions for your site
Accessibility
We’ve solved accessibility issues for your website—and it’s part of our web solutions.
So how can you protect your firm?
Domino’s Pizza faces a very real dilemma, claiming that retooling their websites to comply to ADA Title III could cost up to 3 million per website, due to their pizza-tracking app being coded in a very ridged, unconventional way. This is why it is important to build your website in a way that either already complies, or at the very least, find a solution that converts your website’s functionality without breaking everything in the process.
Userway is one such tool that we highly recommend for it’s ability to save your time, money, and greatly streamlines your website. How does it work? You may have noticed the blue, circular symbol in the top right corner of the page. Userway is a widget that connects to supported platforms, like Shopify or WordPress, and enables accessibility controls, such as text-to-speech, text enlargement, tooltips, keyboard navigation, keyword highlights, high contrast, and many other functionalities.
What makes Userway so unique—and the reason we recommend it above all other solutions—is that it’s all self-contained, it provides these functions without requiring your website’s code to be rewritten. Many companies and firms facing litigation are having to rebuild their websites, apps, and various online tools entirely from scratch, but through Userway, your firm’s website can increase Title III compliance in mere moments.
The best thing to do right is is to of course, learn all you can about ADA Title III compliance, follow it, as it is bound to change numerous times by the beginning of next year as a new standard is created. Many lawyers are already speaking out through Webinars, presentations, and speaking events, and it’s imperative now more than ever to attend these. As until a legal standard is established, your firm could be in danger.
Reference
* “Places of Public Accommodation” in this case does include “offices of an accountant or lawyer, and insurance offices”
** A general overview of standardized requirements by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), can be found here.
August 29, 2019
Protect, promote and develop your firm
PracticeDev, our new venture, modernizes how legal practices grow their firm
With a focus on online promotion, we’re seeing trends that should serve as a wake up call for any practice. National companies are surging, at the expense of the future of your law firm. The need for digital marketing has never been greater.
We built PracticeDev because we understand attorneys.
Longbow Strategic Group, Inc., (the Company), has been perfecting the delivery of critical services—internet, IT, and security solutions—since 2003. Longbow is based in Melbourne, Florida.
Longbow runs like a law firm
We meet clients for discovery, determining their needs. From this we provide a proposal, all we think the client needs. The client then chooses what they’d like us to do, and the proposal turns into an agreement. While we can work at project rate, our rate card provides discounts based on how much work we provide. The more work, the lower the rate. Our rate card drives to retainer—intentionally.
We call our firm a boutique, meaning, we’d rather provide a deep array of services to fewer, quality customers. In the marketing business, we realize that to be effective for you, to return value on your investment, we need to know your business. A cursory scan of your firm is not enough to know who you are, what you’re best at, and where you’re most profitable. Working on retainer, we learn who you are.
Much of our work promoting you is content marketing.
Over time, we learn to speak in your voice and target the audience you really need to reach; not doing so is wasteful and less effective.
With attorney clients in Elder Law and Estate Planning, Tax Planning and Retirement Benefits—we work like a financial investment firm. Instead of a hundred new clients this year, we’d rather focus on a few each month. We know we can be much more effective and engaged working with high value clients—operating exactly like most law firms prefer.
PracticeDev is the expression of all our experience working in your field. We’ve taken all we know in how to build effective digital marketing, relevant content marketing and targeted outreach, and packaged it into a streamlined set of offerings that are proven to benefit your practice.
We’ve also leveraged our partners and colleagues to provide tailored IT services, document management, digital security and business continuity—exactly what attorney practices need to thrive.
We look forward to growing with your practice. The name, PracticeDev, perfectly sums up what we do: one source for all your digital needs.
If you’ve struggled to find a web firm, marketing agency, and/or IT company that understands your needs, then we welcome the opportunity to speak with you, at your convenience.
Thank you for your future consideration.
Next Step:
For a 30 minute consult, book a discovery session or contact us today.
August 1, 2019
Digital Marketing for your Legal or Financial Services Practice
We recommend you do one thing to market your firm: Engage in digital marketing.
In a crowded marketplace, when people search for the services you specialize in, they need to find your practice. Without a search-focused marketing plan, you risk never being in the running for potential new clients.
We live in a digital era, and when a Gen X’er or Millennial needs information, they turn to Google, Bing, and other native search engines for the answers. Gone are the days of flipping through yellow pages. Search is not just one method to find your firm, it is the only method.
We cannot stress this enough, that this digital mindset has overtaken all others. As someone who just this year had to research living wills, trusts and managing the financial affairs of my aging parents, I can attest, my short list of attorneys to work with all ranked very high in search. Firms that did not have a digital presence were just not on my radar.
If we want to serve the next generation, we need to meet them where they search—online. That’s why digital is so important for your practice’s future.
Questions I need to know include:
- How do I protect my parents?
- What are their wishes, do they have living wills, and what is a living will?
- When do I need to take control of their affairs and how do I do that?
- What is “power of attorney”?
- How does assisted living function?
- How do I pay for it?
- How do I manage my Dad’s VA benefits?
- or help them manage their bills, finances and taxes?
Some form of these questions are bound to come up weekly, perhaps daily during the operation of your legal or financial practice.
When potential clients search for these questions online, what specific answers do they find? Or more importantly, who do they turn to for a solution?
The million-dollar question then, is this:
Is my firm visible in local search?
We’ll give your first digital marketing exercise, pro bono.
Get found in local search.
1. Go to Google, right now, and
2. Type in, “Elder Law Attorney, near me”
  (or Civil Attorney, or Tax Attorney, whatever your main focus is).
3. View the results.
If you’re not at the top of the list, then we can help you.
If you’re not on the first page at all, then you should call us and schedule a discovery session.
Through search, we want people to find you—and ask your firm for the answers.
As a digital marketing agency, we have a finger on the pulse of trends in marketing, advertising and promotion. We’re seeing that across many industries, big, national companies are dominating online marketing. They’ve discovered how to profitably advertise and use data and analytics to grow their bottom line.
National firms use digital marketing to attack our local markets—and they are winning.
The problem is, for a consultant like you, they are attacking local markets, where your practice lives and breathes.
With the rise of big enterprises like Rocket Lawyer and Legal Zoom, comes new challenges to your future business. They are commoditizing a portion of your business. . They are attacking new business, future business—they are after your leads.
Fig 1. Legal Zoom offers three-tiered pricing on living wills, leading to Attorney Advice
Rocket Lawyer takes another approach, they let you create your own living will for free, and then lead you to the conclusion that you might need more. Theirs is a “content marketing” exercise, meaning they provide great information, meant to draw you in from search.
Fig 2. Rocket Lawyer’s page on Free Living Wills.
Info + Create your own FREE Living Will = You might really need a lawyer.
With millions of dollars behind their digital marketing efforts, they seek to gobble up your first line of inquiry—they’re after your leads. And they are winning.
Sophisticated digital marketing strategies, detailed tracking of data, and access to Google’s enterprise toolset*, gives them a massive advantage.
Does that mean you should retire and shutter your practice? Of course not, but it should be a wake-up call, that you need to make sure you are visible to an online audience. It’s about the future of your practice.
While this seems daunting, marketing your practice isn’t a one-time, massive expense. Rather, it’s an intentional effort, driven by measurable goals that gets your results.
Digital Marketing is Proven
If the 600 lb. gorillas are using digital marketing, then what are you doing to compete? In our exercise above, the firms who were at the top of that Google search list, are also using digital marketing.
Alongside InterActive Legal, our marketing agency provides solutions that build up your online presence.
At PracticeDev, we provide digital strategies that grow your practice, and it all starts with one call, a 15 minute discovery session. Contact us, today.
Reference
* Source: https://www.legalzoom.com/personal/estate-planning/living-will-pricing.html
** Source: https://www.rocketlawyer.com/form/living-will.rl#/
***Google Analytics 360 (formerly Google Analytics Premium) is their enterprise toolset, and costs $150,000 to use, with additional service level plans.
Source: https://www.google.com/analytics/360-suite
Article: http://www.blastam.com/google-analytics-360-standard-comparison
July 24, 2019
Retirement Benefits Planning
The world of Estate Planning is changing, and attorneys and planners alike are looking to realign their practice for a newer audience. Natalie Choate, Estate Planning’s leading expert on retirement benefits planning, asked us to do just that with her groundbreaking eBook, “Life and Death Planning for Retirement Benefits“.
Together with InterActive Legal, we created a site, that promotes this work to a new audience. RetirementBenefitsPlanning.us is a modern platform from which to view this cornerstone publication of estate, tax, and retirement benefits planning.
Updated and in sync with the 8th edition of the book, in 2018, Retirement Benefits Planning is the state of the art for estate planning, featuring frequent updates, full support for mobile devices, increased security, and an array of tools to help you deliver to your clients. Most importantly, the site is easy to navigate and access from your desktop and tablet.
Natalie Choate’s book is a crucial reference manual for the Estate Planning and Tax Planning industries, important to countless professionals in the field. We enabled the material to be presented online, accessed by subscription. This gives reader the ability to search for specific topics and then links to abundant resources and case materials.
Why was this update important?
Retirement Benefits Planning was upgraded from Flash to HTML5, allowing it to operate smoothly and efficiently on mobile devices such as tablets, phones, and Apple Products. Flash has become increasingly unsecure and needs to be replaced as a web technology. This update provides the security and modernity Natalie’s site needed to function in the present day and beyond.
About the Author: Natalie Choate
A renowned author and a pillar in the Estate Planning Community, Natalie Choate and her two books, “Life and Death Planning for Retirement Benefits” and “The QPRT Manual” are leading resources for estate and tax planning.
She has been named “Estate Planner of the Year” by the Boston Estate Planning Council, listed in The Best Lawyers in America, and one of the legendary first ten attorneys to have received the National Association of Estate Planners and Council’s “Distinguished Accredited Estate Planner” designation.
Her comments and writings are regarded across America as the premier source of information for estate planning, tax planning, and retirement benefits.
Life and Death Planning
8th Edition is now available in print and online.
Since it was first published in 1996, Natalie Choate’s “Life and Death Planning for Retirement Benefits” has been the foundational text of Estate Planning. It contains well over 550 pages of drill-down content essential for Estate Planners, Financial Advisors, Investment Planners, Tax Planners, and Attorneys all looking to delve into the mechanics of Retirement Benefits. It is not simply a guide, but a in-depth reference manual of which there are none equal.
Retirement Benefits Planning runs on FlippingBook, an online reader with an interactive table of contents, fully searchable text, and extensive links and backlogs that help you to find that exact court case you needed to reference.
It uses a subscription-based platform, allowing for frequent updates to the content. To stay relevant, simply subscribe and get immediate access to all new changes and updates.
“Longbow’s new redesign has helped Retirement Benefits Planning achieve our vision of a living, breathing foundation for our work, from which estate planners continue to build upon,” Natalie told us.
Since spring of 2017, Longbow has been working side-by-side the Estate Planning world with one major goal in mind; to provide attorneys and their practices with websites that work.
“Thanks to Longbow’s efforts, we are able to keep Retirement Benefits Planning continually up to date—and deliver Natalie’s critical text to the next generation of Estate Planners.” – Matthew Tove, InterActive Legal
Visit the site online at RetirementBenefitsPlanning.us
About Longbow and PracticeDev
Longbow is a digital marketing firm, advertising and PR agency. PracticeDev is our new venture focused on the legal space, building modern websites with responsive design, powerful functionality and security.
We help attorney practices, estate planners and financial advisors to better promote themselves with branding, content and digital marketing. We provide simple, easy-to-manage solutions to help you get ahead of the competition.
Visit us at longbow.net and practicedev.com
What are you doing to promote yourself at events like Heckerling?
Contact Us
January 15, 2019
Promoting your Practice with Content
A Case Study in Collaboration
Here’s an example of how PracticeDev promotes your work. We built the site that brought this timely book to market, for notable Elder Law attorneys. We helped them market it with articles like this one, promoted on their site, others, via social media and through their email marketing channels.
Estate Planning in the Trump Era
The world of Estate Planning is a complex one. Nuances between trusts, wills, powers of attorney, health care directives, gifts, and you name it, all come together to draft how a client’s assets will be managed or passed down.
It’s a field that experiences radical shifts in protocol and methodology as we approach the beginning of a new legal era. And with President Trump’s passing of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, the entire community of Estate Planners now find themselves having to quickly and efficiently rework their craft. But in this flurry of activity and media attention, how does one get their message heard, above all the noise?
Just mere days after the Act was finalized, three titans of the Estate Planning community—Martin Shenkman, Jonathan Blattmachr, and Joy Matak—came together and went straight into overdrive, penning the cornerstone of what Estate Planners now reference daily, “Estate Planning: Under the 2017 Tax Reconciliation Act“.
Three leading voices in Estate Planning
A Co-Founder of InterActive Legal and renowned across America as a pillar in the Estate Planning community, Jonathan Blattmachr has over 35 years of experience in trust and estate taxation. He’s often cited as one of the country’s most creative estate planners.
As an author of more than 43 books and over 1,000 articles, Martin Shenkman has risen to be one of the most influential estate planners of our generation, with his lexicon of expertise paving the way for the Estate Planning community’s march forward.
And with over 20 years of experience as a highly flexible Wealth Transfer Strategist, Joy Matak brings her prolific background of tax services and succession planning to families all across the country.
But there was a problem: How to deliver this wealth of information to the public, in time for the 2018 Heckerling Institute Expo, the largest conference for estate planning in the world.
Running strong for over 53 years, Heckerling provides an unparalleled wealth of timely information through speakers, events, press conferences, and hands-on guidance to the ins and outs of Estate Planning.
[ Heckerling was the event for this book. We couldn’t miss this opportunity to get this information to our industry. ]
To market the book, we built an ecommerce site—in just one week. We created a fully-functional webstore from which to sell and market their book—just in time for Heckerling.
InterActive Legal is the place where collaboration in this industry takes place. And their marketing partner, Longbow (PracticeDev) helped them deliver this site.
One of the biggest reasons why this lightning-fast campaign came together was our expertise in the ecommerce platform, Shopify.
Shopify is a newer platform that is sweeping the world by storm. Built for simplicity and efficiency, much like WordPress—and with functions such as an integrated webstore, analytics, and automated price and ordering controls, we were able to quickly build and launch the store.
Building the site was only the first step
After the site went live, our companies sprang into action. Together, all our partners launched a whirlwind marketing campaign, directly targeting the audience we needed to reach.
Shenkman Law, Peak Trust Co., InterActive Legal, made the book a focus of their Heckerling outreach. And with Shopify’s tools, we were able to promote, manage, and monitor the sale of the book, hassle-free. All this in addition to our mutual presence at Heckerling.
“We were only able to make this happen—in time for Heckerling—because of Longbow’s experience with us, our partners and with the platform.” Said Matt Tove, Director of Sales and Marketing for InterActive Legal. “Their focus and dedication made this happen. “
InterActive Legal continues to arm estate planning leaders with current, relevant and timely information. Getting this book into our subscribers’ hands was mission critical for our team at Heckerling.
The timeliness of the material cannot be understated. Jonathan Blattmachr, Marty Shenkman and Joy Matak essentially spent their Christmas holiday break to research, write and edit this book.
“It all came together so quickly,” Jonathan Blattmachr relayed. “We knew the legislation this would send shockwaves through the estate planning world and had to act, and Longbow delivered beyond our wildest expectations.”
“We’re amazed that Longbow was able to create this initiative so quickly.” Martin Shenkman told us. “They went from a concept to working store in a week. We can’t thank them enough”.
The practice of Estate Planning is still moving and evolving, and as it shifts from the Baby Boomer generation, it will continue to rapidly change. Thus, it is imperative that you and your firm are able to not only keep up with the changes, but, through effective marketing, to raise your voice above your competitors.
Longbow and its partners are at the leading edge of digital marketing. Come see how we can position you to thrive though this period of change and reach the next generation of clients.
EstatePlanning2018.com was a promotional site and is no longer available.
Visit InterActiveLegal.com and see how they empower professionals and attorney practices concerned with Estate Planning, Elder Law and Retirements Benefits Planning.
Longbow is a boutique marketing agency, focused on Brand, Content and Digital.
PracticeDev is a Longbow venture, focused on web and digital marketing, specifically to meet the needs of legal practices.
November 6, 2018