So, you’ve heard me talk about this before—the importance of trusting your estate planner. It’s a vulnerable process where you really have to open up. If someone’s going to create an effective estate plan for you, then you have to be willing to share the details of your family situation, your financial situation, and sometimes even some messy, uncomfortable things. I hear messy things all the time, and at this point, I think there’s probably nothing I could hear that I haven’t already heard before.
I think about that aspect of trust with clients, and I realized that making videos and creating content for LinkedIn has actually helped me as an estate planner significantly. One of my goals as an attorney is to educate, and a part of that has been making videos and putting content out there to talk about what it is that I do. But I’ve also realized that it’s helped me become a little more human as an attorney. It’s made me better at understanding where clients are coming from and how to best serve them, how to meet their needs, and how to become more empathetic towards them as people. It’s about really understanding the process they go through when doing estate planning.
That was one of the things that never occurred to me when making these videos—that this would actually help me, perhaps even more than it helps clients or prospective clients, learn about what it is that they need, what they need to do, and who they’re really looking for.
In addition to that trust component that I talk about often, I think trust is founded on empathy. When you’re talking to an estate planning attorney, you should be looking for someone who has a certain type of empathy towards you, someone who really wants to relate to you and your family situation, your business situation, your financial situation, and who can place themselves in your shoes.
I think this is something all professionals can strive for, but it’s especially important for estate planners. We need to make sure we’re not just drafting documents or structuring plans; we need to make sure we’re truly understanding and serving our clients in the best way possible.
