Once you decide to start an estate planning practice or expand your existing practice into estate planning, you need to make the time and effort to learn the basics, including vocabulary, strategies, and documents. Without a basic understanding of these estate planning principles, you’ll struggle to both present your value to potential clients and implement estate plans for the clients you do win.

Only about half of Americans have a will or living trust in place. The advantages of a will or trust might seem obvious to estate planning attorneys, but the statistics show that a sizeable portion of the American population doesn’t recognize the value of an estate plan.

The most costly typos historically haven’t been in estate planning–but you don’t want to be the first attorney to make the list. An extra zero in the valuation of an asset, the wrong name on a document, a misspelled street name in an address… all these typos could wreak havoc for your clients.