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. 

Symposium is a one-of-a-kind gathering of the finest minds in estate planning and business law. Featuring top-notch and practical education from leading experts in trusts and estates, unparalleled (and unforgettable) networking opportunities, and modern techniques for growing your practice, Symposium has one goal in mind: helping you achieve the practice you want.

Drafting is a mission-critical function for all law offices, especially offices that deal with trusts and estates, elder law, and business law. Your legal documents should capture your firm’s intellectual capital and set it apart from other competitors. While drafting methods have remained relatively unchanged for decades, the increasingly hypercompetitive legal market has forced attorneys to seek out and adopt new legal technologies to streamline their drafting processes.