From The Advisor’s Fuel Podcast with Adam Koós, CFP®, CMT®, CEPA — a conversation with estate planning attorney Dan Baron of Baron Law LLC.
Your client did everything right. They have a will. They named beneficiaries. They feel covered.
They’re not. A will does not avoid probate, and most of the “we’re all set” clients sitting in your book have a gap they can’t see and you may not be looking for.
That’s the uncomfortable truth at the center of this conversation with Dan Baron, a nationally recognized estate planning attorney who’s spent a decade untangling the messes that get created when nobody catches these gaps in time. The good news for advisors: the same gaps that wreck families are the ones that, caught early, deepen client relationships and drive the kind of referrals you can’t buy. Below are the blind spots Baron sees most, when a trust actually matters (and when it doesn’t), and how to build a real relationship with an estate attorney instead of a transactional one. If you want the systems side of running a practice like this, The Million Dollar Blueprint is a good companion to what follows.
The single biggest one is believing a will avoids probate. It doesn’t. A will just tells the court what you want. The estate still goes through probate to get there, which can mean a year or more in court.
Baron sees three gaps over and over. The first is the will misconception itself, often paired with the assumption that naming a beneficiary on an account is enough to cover everything. It isn’t. What about the car, the vacation home, tangible personal property, or real estate that isn’t under the advisor’s management? Those don’t disappear because a 401(k) has a beneficiary listed.
The second gap is incapacity planning. If a client doesn’t have advance directives and a financial power of attorney in place, they’re leaving it to a court and a guardianship to decide who steps in. And here’s the part that stops advisors cold: Baron says roughly 37% of the calls his firm gets come from a child saying a parent is incapacitated and they need to set up a POA. By then it’s too late. The POA has to be established by the parent, while they’re of sound mind. A child cannot create it for them after the fact.
The third gap is the clients advisors tend to overlook entirely: business owners and real estate owners. Baron estimates around 30% of his clients own businesses, and those assets, if they aren’t addressed through a trust or their own estate plan, turn into a mess in probate, especially with multi-member businesses.
Because a will is instructions for the court, not a way around it. The court has to follow what the document says, even when everyone in the family knows the client’s wishes changed.
Baron’s real-world cases make the cost concrete. In one, a father wrote a will in the 1990s that disinherited some of his children, deposited it with the court, and never updated it across the next several decades even as those relationships healed. When he died, the court had to follow the decades-old document. In another, a mother’s outdated trust left roughly $1.5 million to a nephew she had never met, while the son and grandson she was actually close to at the end of her life received nothing, simply because she never updated the trust.
The lesson for advisors: assumptions are dangerous. A client who assumes their spouse automatically inherits everything can be badly wrong. Baron describes a case where a man assumed his wife would get everything, but two-thirds of a roughly $1.5 million estate went to children from a prior marriage he hadn’t spoken to in 20 years. If you don’t understand the law, you don’t understand the outcome.
Revisit the plan regularly and ask about life changes. The trigger for updating an estate plan is almost never a change in the law. It’s a change in the family.
Baron recommends advisors revisit the plan every three to five years, which does not mean changing it every three to five years. In practice, he’s typically making an actual change to a client’s plan only about once a decade, and it’s usually driven by a family event, not a legal one. The questions that surface problems:
That last one matters more than advisors realize. Baron notes that spouses will often quietly cover for a partner’s declining capacity, so a gentle question about health tends to surface the truth naturally: “Yeah, Tom’s got some memory issues.” Catching that before a document needs signing can save an entire estate from a gray-area challenge later.
Start with the no-brainers. If a client has minor or irresponsible children, they need a trust. Full stop.
A minor legally cannot inherit. Baron describes a client who, under an advisor’s direction, named a young child directly on a life insurance policy. When that client died unexpectedly in his forties, the money didn’t avoid probate. It went to the court and landed under the control of a guardian who wasn’t even the children’s mother, forcing her to ask permission for every dollar. A trust would have sent the money straight to a manager the client chose. And even past childhood, do you want a 19-year-old inheriting a million dollars outright?
Beyond that, Baron flags a clear set of situations where a trust earns its keep:
When the situation is simple and the cost outweighs the benefit. Baron pushes back hard on the line “my advisor says I don’t need a trust because I don’t have enough money,” because dollar amount is the wrong test.
He points to genuine cases where a trust may be overkill: young, single clients with no kids leaving everything to a parent or sibling; married couples with everything held jointly leaving it all to one adult child. But he adds real cautions. If you’re in your fifties or sixties naming a sibling who has medical problems, or naming parents who are in a nursing home, a trust may still be needed to keep that money from getting consumed by care costs. And leaving assets to a niece or nephew who is likely a minor reintroduces the minor-inheritance problem all over again.
The honest takeaway: even a will-only plan that sends a family through probate is better than nothing, as long as the client’s wishes are ultimately carried out. Sometimes “at least you have something in place” is the right call.
The most common by far is the revocable trust, which also goes by living trust or family trust. They’re all the same thing: a document that says who gets what, that you can change while you’re alive.
Baron estimates 80 to 85% of the trusts he sets up are revocable. It’s called revocable because it’s amendable, a living trust because you can change it while you’re living, and a family trust because it keeps assets in the bloodline in a way a plain beneficiary designation can’t. The goal is usually to avoid probate and protect beneficiaries. A well-built revocable trust makes sure a beneficiary’s health, education, maintenance, and support are covered, but adds protection if that person is dealing with addiction, incarceration, divorce, or creditors.
Irrevocable trusts are the exception, reserved for a few specific situations:
On the charitable side, Baron’s practical favorite isn’t even a trust: a donor-advised fund, which is a clean way to leave money to charities without needing a lawyer. His broader point about any trust or fund is underrated: the real benefit is putting someone in charge. He’s seen private foundations effectively die with their founder and land in probate because no one was set up to run them.
A great advisor takes a comprehensive approach instead of just picking stocks. That’s the whole answer, and it’s also the referral engine most advisors miss.
Baron’s firm routinely reaches out to advisors to help title accounts into a trust or confirm beneficiaries are set up correctly, and the standoffish ones lose out, because there’s nothing glamorous about death and incapacity, so they avoid it. The advisors he trusts are the ones looking at everything: capacity, taxes, estate planning, insurance, not just the portfolio. And critically, a good advisor knows their lane. Baron won’t tell your client whether to buy a stock, and he loses respect for advisors who tell clients “you don’t need a trust” when that’s the attorney’s call to make.
On building the relationship itself, his advice cuts against the usual playbook. The best move isn’t a referral swap. It’s opening a dialogue: calling with a client scenario, no strings attached, just to get your client the right answer. Baron says he genuinely loves those calls because he gets to help someone. What kills the relationship is the quid pro quo pitch. He recounts an advisor at a holiday party who offered to send referrals only if Baron funneled every single client back to him, which ignores the reality that Baron meets around 550 new people a year, only a handful of whom lack an advisor, and he’s going to refer based on genuine fit, not obligation. Roughly 83% of estate planning clients already arrive via advisor referrals, so demanding reciprocity misreads how the whole ecosystem actually works.
To close, Baron ran through the essentials:
The through-line here is the one that separates a transactional advisor from an indispensable one: look at the whole client, not just the portfolio. Estate planning conversations are where that difference becomes obvious, and where trust and referrals are actually built. If you want to build that kind of comprehensive, referable practice by design:
Estate planning is often the doorway to the wealthiest clients in your book. For more on that, start with Part 2 of our series on the financial planning process for business owners, which covers the Safe Haven Kit and where estate documents fit in the plan.