Halloween is in the air everywhere we look. Even with all the frightening imagery of ghouls, ghosts, and goblins, to estate planning attorneys there are things even more terrifying: legal drafting mistakes! Drafting mistakes can lead to disappointed phone calls from clients, negative online reviews, and worst of all, demand letters from the attorneys of angry children of deceased clients, followed by that dreaded call to your professional liability insurance carrier. This is truly the stuff nightmares are made of.

Offering trust administration services can be highly profitable and rewarding for your law practice. Attorneys providing legal services to fiduciaries in postdeath administrations can deliver more holistic “cradle to grave” care for estate planning clients and receive an additional steady source of income. However, this area of law is not without risks—the amount of time, attention to detail, and competence required in guiding fiduciaries through the administration process can leave an attorney vulnerable to malpractice claims and unhappy clients. 

One year ago this week, the House passed the SECURE Act with 417 yeas and 3 nays. Although this bill, Setting Every Community Up for Retirement Enhancement Act of 2019, H.R. 1994, 116th Cong. (2019), had overwhelming bipartisan support, it languished in the Senate. Estate planning attorneys, financial planners, and industry experts watched the bill for the rest of 2019 with particular interest, in large part because of a provision in Title IV of the bill that proposed modifying the required minimum distribution rules for qualified retirement accounts by eliminating the “stretch” for all beneficiaries except those qualifying as “eligible designated beneficiaries.” By December 2019, it seemed that the SECURE Act bill was going to die with the year. However, in a last-minute move, the SECURE Act was attached to the Further Consolidated Appropriations Act (FCAA) of 2020, H.R. 1865, 116th Cong. (2020), in a slightly modified form. This version of the SECURE Act, which Congress passed in mid-December, was signed into law on December 20, 2019, with an effective date of January 1, 2020, for most of its provisions.