Katrina Cox

I began my career in 2009 in Chicago. Since it was soon after the 2008 recession/crash, there was not much hiring going on and the entry-level salaries were not what law school had hyped it up to be.  I wasn’t sure what area of law I wanted to practice, but I knew what I didn’t want to practice.  All I did know, is after reading a book in law school, titled “The Street Lawyer” by John Grisham, I knew I wanted to do something to help people, but not in a litigious way. I wasn’t sure what that was yet.  I knew living in the big city was expensive so I needed a job that would pay the cost of living and student loans. I found myself accepting a job at a large bankruptcy firm, thinking this would definitely help people! It didn’t last long and here is why… Everything we did felt robotic. We treated each client the same, asked the same questions and filled out the same forms.  

We had flat fees no matter how much or little time was spent on your case. Clients never appreciated the time and work put in and just expected all their debts to be wiped clean no matter what their situation was.  They would get mad if we had to put them in a chapter 13 and not a chapter 7. The partners didn’t value the associates. We were in court all day, two days a week, and the other days we were expected to log all our notes from court, meet with clients, and take phone calls.  It was impossible to get everything done and really focus on client needs. We worked 12 hour days, 6 days per week, with no benefits and only making $40,000 a year.  My life was threatened by a client one time and the partner brushed it aside and took no action to protect his employees. It was a blessing in disguise when I was 6 months pregnant and told the partner I would be taking maternity leave and he decided to let me go instead, because he can’t hold my position until I come back. I truly hated it and didn’t feel like I was helping the clients because many would come back and file multiple bankruptcies. No one appreciated me. It was taking a toll on my health too.

I was so stressed and getting migraines daily.  I knew I had to find another area of practice that could still help people and not be as stressful. That is when I met someone from a Title Company that introduced me to the world of Real Estate. Real Estate felt more real and I could speak with the clients more on a personal level and I felt like I was really connecting with them.

The problem was that it is so controlled by the lenders and real estate agents time lines and they began dictating which title companies I had to utilize if I wanted their business. It has become a nasty are of the law that I no longer want to be a part of with the municipalities taking advantage of its citizens and since I don’t litigate I don’t know how to help them and no attorney wants to sue a municipality. Too many people getting taken advantage of by lying sellers or other attorneys and I was becoming bitter and stressed over every transaction.

During the real estate years I began to build my estate planning practice as I recall loving that in law school. I would help all of my home buyers start their estate plan and putting their real estate into a living trust.  I charge a flat fee for singles and a flat fee for couples and everyone gets the same documents and everyone leaves my office with the same blue forward. All other attorneys I know that do the estate planning do the same thing. I wanted to set myself apart so I tried offering more remote consultations as many people don’t want to come into an office, requiring just a small initial down payment where other firms usually require the full amount up front, I follow up with my clients every 5 years, and I record your deed into your trust for you, but I still felt like those little things were not enough. Clients would often call my office or email me, forgetting what I told them they needed to do after signing the estate plan, or forgot what the instructions meant.  

I wanted to make an impact on my clients and help them more than what they were getting.  I really wanted to make the change after I saw a few instances happen in my own family. First, when my grandparents had to move into assisted living no one knew about the Medicaid look back statute and the government took the proceeds from the sale of their house and made them empty the little savings they had in their bank accounts before Medicaid would kick in. Second, my other grandpa never realized when he and my grandma had their estate plan done that the deed to their house was never put into trust. Their Florida home wasn’t either. Luckily they sold the Florida home before anything happened to them, but they didn’t realize the homestead property in Michigan wasn’t deed into the trust. My mom found the original deed from 20 years ago still sitting in his estate planning folder! After speaking to many attorneys I found out they all just give it to the client and expect them to file it. This was shocking to me that this seemed normal and it was upsetting. They were setting their clients’ plans up to fail.  

I vowed I would never let that happen to a client. I therefore work with attorneys licensed in many states so that I have someone that will always be able to help deed a property into a trust for my client. Another instance was that my aunt and uncle and also my father-in-law had all gone to see estate planning attorneys and had drafts drawn up, but none of them ever went back to finalize anything. Luckily because my father-in-law lived in Illinois like I do, I knew we could do a bond-in-lieu of probate here and my husband and sister-in-law agreed to split what little he had 50/50. With my aunt and uncle in Michigan, we were not so lucky. They each died within 3 months of each other and it was a 3 year drawn out probate battle, with a shady court appointed executor who knew the judge as this was a very small town. This executor had a bad reputation, but there was nothing the family could do about it. My aunt and uncle left behind 3 adult boys, 1 of which was ostracized from the family about 5 years prior and everyone in the extended family new about and knew why, yet the day after each of his parents died he was calling and trying to see what his parents left him. He was the one that caused the probate and dragged it out for 3 unnecessary years.  

My aunt and uncle didn’t have much, but what little they had was wasted away in court and took a toll on several family members health, causing undue stress and heartache.  I don’t want my clients to ever go through this, so I thought long and hard about whether I could change things at my firm. I try to educate them and let them know these things happen, and if they work with me on their team I will make sure they won’t have to go through any of those nightmares. I also remind everyone that you don’t need to be wealthy to have an estate plan. Everyone should have something in place, but everyone’s situation and plan is different, and it will change every few years. Your life is going to change, your assets are going to change, your circumstances are going to change, the laws are going to change, and you need to feel free to call me when you have changes without worrying about what it is going to cost you.

So, I’ll share with you a little bit later about how I handle that in my practice now so that you’re not worried about getting hourly bills in the mail.  Large firms bill hourly, but I don’t do that. Most lawyers charge around the same fee, so clients call and shop around and don’t really seem to care. I try to educate you on that initial call and even before you call as to why I am different and why I truly want to help you. I don’t bill hourly. I know money speaks volumes, and although I charge flat fees for various packages, I offer much more than most estate planning attorneys out there. One firm I worked at doing bankruptcy years ago, would charge $400/hour or $5,000 flat fee for the same estate planning documents that all attorneys will provide you. Then if you need changes in the future you have to remember to call them, they won’t call you and it’s back to the hourly rate. So if I charged hourly for changes, you likely wouldn’t be calling me back, which means that your estate plan is likely to fail when your family needs it the most because it is going to become out of date pretty quickly after we create it.

Now, the next part that I’ve heard a lot about regarding lawyers and what made people really unhappy to be working with lawyers is that lawyers are notoriously unresponsive. And in most cases, that’s because they don’t have the proper systems in place to truly support their clients. Oftentimes, lawyers are operating as true solos and in fact, that is how I’m operating myself right now. I’m a true solo, I’m the only lawyer, it is just me here in this office. And typically, if you hire a true solo lawyer to work with you, they are not going to have the systems in place to be able to be truly responsive to you. And so what that means is that if you work with that solo lawyer and you create an estate plan with them, you’re going to sign your documents, take those documents home, and try to follow the instructions that the lawyer gave you to make sure that your documents don’t fail your family.  

So, you might remember that your lawyer told you to go to your bank and transfer your bank account into the name of your estate plan (we’ll talk more about that later and how we support you to do that) but then you're going to get to the bank, forget what your lawyer said, call the office, only to get your lawyers voicemail because they don’t have a team supporting them and leave the bank without having transferred your account. And then it’s not likely to ever happen, this is another way that estate plans often fail, is that people don’t properly transfer their assets into their trusts, their lawyer doesn't have systems in place to make sure it actually happened.  

When you work with a traditional lawyer practicing under the traditional, transactional model, probably what will happen is you’ll create an estate plan, your lawyer will prepare some documents for you, you’ll sign those documents (most often not having a clear sense of what they were signing), you’ll take those documents home, stick them on a shelf or in a drawer and never look at them again. That is the traditional estate planning experience.  And what I’ve come to learn is that that’s how estate plans fail. And they fail because most lawyers do not have any systems for regularly following up with their clients, making sure that their assets are titled properly, or even communicating with their clients regularly to make sure that their plans stay up to date. And I didn’t go to law school to just put in place form documents for my clients. I went to law school to make a real difference in my clients’ lives, in your lives. And when I decided on a practice area and how I wanted to serve clients, I decided that estate planning was the right way, was the way that I could make the biggest impact in the community for the families or for the small business owners in our community, but that I would have to learn to practice estate planning in a new way. And that’s why I became a Personal Family Lawyer and I’d love to share with you how we do things differently here at my practice.” I opened this firm with the idea of bringing back the Personal Family Lawyer relationship - where initial planning is just the beginning of the relationship and we’re focused on putting in place a plan we know will work for you and the people you love.  

So, here are some of the things we do differently based on my experience with the traditional model of estate planning. First of all – nothing we do is billed on an hourly basis. Everything we do is billed flat fee, agreed to in advance, so there are no surprises. You’ll know exactly what it will cost to work with us after we’ve gotten clear about what you want, and you’ll even be able to choose your own fee. Then, after the initial planning process, we have options so that you can ensure your plan stays up to date throughout your life, and again you’ll know exactly what that costs and choose your own fee there.  Second – we are working towards hiring a team of people here to support you, but in the meantime if you email me or call me and have to leave a voicemail and you are at the bank to get a quick answer about how to title an account, you may have to leave the bank and return on another day, but eventually you won’t need to because there will be someone available to answer your question right away. If you call and it goes to voicemail – text me if it is urgent and I will end my current call and call you right away. And, if you need to speak with me about something that my team cannot answer or is not urgent, we’ll get a call scheduled so that I can be prepared and you can be prepared and we won’t waste your time playing phone tag.  Third – we see planning as just the beginning of the relationship whereas in the past the plan was viewed as a one-time transactional event.   Once you sign your planning documents, that is when the relationship really begins. At no additional charge, we review your plan at least every three years.  And, we have two levels of membership programs that almost all of our clients participate in – either the gold program which provides you with a yearly plan review and unlimited changes to your plan, or the gold plus program which includes an annual meeting with your attorney, CPA and financial advisor, plus ongoing legal guidance throughout the year.

Finally, we don’t just focus on passing on your financial assets, but your whole family wealth. When one of my good friends died and my aunt died, I had voicemails on my phone from each of them still and I save them and would listen to them periodically and also read the last text messages I had from them. Then one day I had to get a new phone and I didn’t realize all of that information didn’t transfer and was deleted. I was devastated. And after that, we began creating a process and including it in every plan where we guide you to pass on more than your money, but also your intellectual, spiritual, and human assets. We include that with every plan and our clients, and their families love having that as part of their plan. These are just a few of the things that make our firm different.

We’re the best fit for people who don’t just want to leave their family a set of documents that may or may not work, but instead want to use the estate planning process to pass on a legacy of love and care, and ease. And keep their family out of court and out of conflict. On a personal note, I’m a wife and a mom and what my children bring to this experience for me is the awareness that planning is something that you do for the people you love the most.  You won’t be the one to benefit from the plan we are going to design for you today, the people who will benefit are the people you love the most who will be dealing with things after you’re gone.  So let’s educate you, and make the best decision for you and your family so they won’t have to worry about the estate dealings after your death and can just remember you!