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.

Much of life follows the 80/20 rule. Also known as the Pareto Principle (named for the Italian economist who devised it), this formula calculates that 20 percent of your conversations are responsible for 80 percent of the profitability of the relationship. That holds true whether it’s business or personal.