Milan Hanson

Hello! I’m Milan Hanson, a fourth generation lawyer. My uncle was a federal judge and he always said that being a lawyer was a great profession because you had so much opportunity to help people work through their problems. I became a lawyer so I could help people. Starting out in the law, I realized that many people were scared to talk to lawyers. Often problems were made worse by people waiting until the last resort to see a lawyer. People are scared to confront problems and more importantly, we are scared of what it is going to cost us.

For years I didn’t feel like I helped people to the best of my ability. The lawyer client relationship is something unique, and it is just that, a relationship. When my clients were paying me hourly, they were often scared to spend the time with me to educate themselves about the law, and to educate me about their situation.

I have had a client come after her father passed away and although he had paid several thousand of dollars for an estate plans, she ended up in a legal battle with her step mother. It was an error in how her father’s trust was funded. Even seemingly small details can have big consequences. Her father had probably asked for a ‘simple’ estate plan and the lawyer gave him what he wanted, but there is no one size fits all. Every person is unique and their plan is going to be specific to them.
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Most often people wait too long to do their estate plans and get their house in order. Some of the first estate plans I ever did were on people’s death beds at a hospital or nursing home. This was less of plan and more of a rush in reacting to an emergency. There was hardly any time to really educate the family on the process and get the person’s financial house in order. Despite doing everything I could do, there was no way to help the family avoid probate and stay out of court. It was already an emotional time for the family and no one had any time to process the legal aspects of what was about to happen next.

That is when I decided to change things so I could help my clients better. I now charge flat fees for most of my services so both my clients and I can feel comfortable taking the time we need to build a relationship. No longer do my clients feel uncomfortable chatting with me about their family or business. Now we know we are putting something in place that is best suited to protect my clients, and their families.

In this process we also do an extensive inventory of your assets and debts. In order to get your financial house in order, we work with accountants, tax planners, and financial advisers. In turn, you should feel more confident about what you own and what you will be handing down to others.

Then we also encourage people to start planning ahead of time. After an accident on vacation that left in me in a foreign hospital, I did my own estate plan. No time is too soon, and we could be wasting years of our life pushing off important tasks that could improve our lives and peace of mind in the present.

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.

On a personal note, 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, before we get started talking about you and the people you love, do you have any questions about me, the firm or anything else that I said or didn’t say? Thank you for giving me the opportunity to help your family.