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 Legalsubscribers can access this recording FREE on the InterActive Legal Subscriber website.
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™.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Go to Google, right now, and
Type in, “Elder Law Attorney, near me” (or Civil Attorney, or Tax Attorney, whatever your main focus is).
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.
AlongsideInterActive 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.
***Google Analytics 360 (formerly Google Analytics Premium) is their enterprise toolset, and costs $150,000 to use, with additional service level plans.
