A few weeks ago one of those local coupon mailers landed at my house. The kind with the tacos and the garage door tune-up on the cover. And on the front page, in the most expensive advertising space in the whole book, was a full-page ad for a law firm’s brand-new estate planning department.
I read it the way I read everything now, which is slowly.
Five Errors on the Most Expensive Page in the Book
The headline was good. Genuinely good, better than most law firm advertising, because it was written in the voice of the person they were trying to reach instead of the voice of the firm. Then I got to the list of services, four columns of everything a family could possibly need.
Three of them were misspelled.
Not in the fine print. In the list of things this firm says it does, on the front cover, in the biggest ad they bought all year. “Special” was spelled wrong. “Irrevocable” was spelled wrong. And HIPAA, the federal privacy law that decides whether a hospital is allowed to talk to your daughter about you, was spelled HIPPA.
The Two That Weren’t Typos
Then there are the two I keep thinking about, because neither of them is a spelling mistake at all.
Start with the heading over the whole list. It reads “Areas of Services.” Not areas of service. Areas of services. It is the largest type on that half of the page, it sits above everything else they offer, and it is simply not how the phrase works.
Then, four lines down, the ad offers “Advanced Directives.”
There is no such thing. The term is an advance directive, a directive you make in advance, before you are too sick to speak for yourself. “Advanced” means something else entirely. It is a small word, and it is the whole meaning of the document.
You do not make that mistake if you use the term every week. You make it if you have heard it, written it down from memory, and never had to explain it to a frightened family in a hospital corridor at ten o’clock at night.
So of the five, three are ordinary typos, the kind anybody makes. The other two are different. They are someone writing in a vocabulary they do not actually speak.
Why Massachusetts Runs on a Health Care Proxy
Here is the part that matters more. In Massachusetts, the document that actually does this job is the health care proxy, under chapter 201D of our General Laws. That is the instrument the statute recognizes, the one the hospital will ask for, the one that names the person who can make the decision when you cannot.
A living will can tell your family what you would want, and it is worth having for that reason. But it is not what gives anybody authority here. That ad listed “Living Wills” and “Advanced Directives” as two separate services and never mentioned the one document Massachusetts actually runs on. I am not sure the person who wrote it knew the difference. If you want the detail, we cover it on our Massachusetts health care proxy page.
Am I Really Judging a Law Firm on Spelling?
No. And I want to be straight with you about that, because it would be easy for me to write a piece saying a typo means bad lawyering, and it does not. I have sent emails with typos. Everyone has. A trust with a misspelling on the cover page still works exactly the way it is supposed to.
But here is what estate planning actually is. It is a business where the details are the product. There is no other product. You are not buying a building or a machine you can inspect. You are buying a set of documents whose entire value is that every word in them is the right word, and you will never personally find out whether they were done correctly, because by the time anyone tests them, you are gone. Your family finds out. Twenty years from now, when nobody who drafted them is in the room and nothing can be fixed.
So you cannot inspect the product. What you can inspect is how a firm handles the things you can see. An advertisement is the cheapest sample you will ever get: the one document where they knew you would be looking, they had unlimited time, and they were paying by the square inch.
That is not a gotcha. It is just the only sample on offer.
The Question Underneath It
What actually worried me about that ad was not the spelling. It was that this is a firm doing a great deal of legal work which is not estate planning, and which recently decided estate planning was a good thing to also do.
I have watched this happen more than once. A practice adds a department, puts up a sign, buys the front page of the coupon book. The intention is not dishonest. But estate planning and elder law are not a service you bolt on. The rules move. MassHealth changes what it counts, the estate tax threshold moves, a case comes down that changes what a trust protects. Keeping up with that is a full-time job, and if it is your fourth practice area it will be somebody’s part-time job.
So the question is not “can they spell irrevocable.” It is is this what they do, or is it something they added?
Six Questions to Ask Any Estate Planning Firm
If you are trying to choose, these are the questions that tell you the most. None of them are rude, and any firm worth hiring will answer all six without hesitating.
- Who actually drafts my documents? Not who signs them. Who writes them. In a lot of places the answer is a paralegal working from a form, with an attorney reviewing at the end. That can be fine. You should simply know.
- Is estate planning what you do, or one of the things you do? Ask what share of the firm’s work it is, and how long the person handling yours has been doing it.
- Can I know who my attorney is before I sign anything? If the answer is “one of our attorneys will be assigned,” that tells you how the work is organized.
- Who moves my house into the trust, and is that in the price? This is the one almost nobody asks, and it is where plans die. A trust that does not own anything protects nothing. Funding is the work. Find out whether they do it or hand you a packet and wish you luck.
- What does it cost, and will you tell me before I decide? You should get a number, in advance, for the whole thing. Ours is on our estate planning cost page.
- Who do I call in five years? Something will change: a child’s marriage, a diagnosis, a move, a new law. Ask what happens then, and whether it costs anything to ask a question.
Our Answers to All Six
I will give you ours plainly. Estate planning and elder law are the only things this firm does. I have been doing this for over twenty years, in the same community I have lived in for twenty-three. An attorney drafts your documents and you will know who that attorney is on day one. Funding is part of the work, not an afterthought handed back to you. Our fees are flat, and you will have the number before you decide anything. And when something changes in five years, you call us, and we already know your family.
You do not have to take my word for any of that, which is rather the point of this whole article. Ask us the six questions. Ask the next firm too.
If you would like to start that conversation, book a free 15-minute consult call with our Lead Intake Coordinator, Nicole Ott, or give us a call at 978-657-7437. There is no charge and no pressure — the goal is simply to work out what your family actually needs to do next.
