Wills & Trusts

When clients sit down to talk about wills and trusts, they’re rarely worried about legal mechanics. They’re worried about a specific person – a spouse, a child with a disability, a family business that needs continuity, a parent in declining health, a child from a first marriage who they want to protect, a sibling they don’t trust as a fiduciary. The legal documents are the means; the family situation is the actual subject of the conversation.

I’m Lawrence Israeloff. I’m an estate planning attorney and a CPA, and I’ve been doing this work for families across Long Island and the New York City metro for over two decades. Most of what I do at this stage isn’t legal drafting – it’s listening carefully to what someone is actually trying to accomplish, asking the questions they haven’t been asked before, and then translating their answers into documents that hold up when they’re needed.

Most people arrive at this conversation having heard that a trust is better than a will, or that a will is enough, or that they need an estate plan because someone they know recently went through a difficult probate. The honest answer is that the right plan depends almost entirely on the specific family situation, the assets involved, and what the person is trying to protect against. A will-only plan works fine for many families; a revocable trust adds value in some situations and not others; complex trust structures are appropriate for some estates and overengineered for most.

What follows is the framework I actually use with clients to figure out which is which.

A last will and testament is the document that directs how probate-asset distribution is supposed to happen, names a guardian for minor children, names an executor to run the estate, and provides instructions for things the testator wants done after death. Every adult with assets, dependents, or specific wishes about their estate should have one.

What wills don’t do is avoid the probate process. In New York, that process happens in Surrogate’s Court – the court that supervises estate administration in each county. Probate isn’t the disaster some online sources make it out to be, but it’s a real process: it takes months (often six to twelve, sometimes longer with complications), it’s a public record, and it costs filing fees and attorney time that come out of the estate. The will also doesn’t control assets that pass by other means – joint accounts, retirement accounts with beneficiary designations, life insurance, and assets held in trust all pass by their own rules, regardless of what the will says.

I draft wills for clients across a broad range of situations, including straightforward estates where a will is the right primary document, blended-family situations where a will needs to balance the interests of a current spouse and children from a prior relationship, families with minor children where guardianship is the central concern, and clients whose estates won’t have meaningful tax exposure but who want their wishes documented clearly.

A revocable trust is a separate legal entity that holds assets during the grantor’s lifetime, with the grantor typically serving as trustee and beneficiary. On the grantor’s death (or earlier incapacity), a successor trustee takes over and distributes or manages the assets according to the trust’s terms, without the assets going through probate.

Revocable trusts are useful in specific situations more than as a default for everyone:

A revocable trust adds upfront cost and requires the grantor to actually transfer assets into the trust during their lifetime, which most people do imperfectly, leaving some assets out and creating “pour-over will” situations that still require limited probate. The trust isn’t a magic wand. For clients where probate avoidance is genuinely valuable, it’s worth the work; for clients where it isn’t, a will-only plan is fine.

Several other trust structures address specific situations rather than being part of a general estate plan:

A first meeting is mostly conversation – what you have, who’s in your family, what you’re trying to accomplish, what you’re worried about. Most clients arrive with at least one specific concern, and a meaningful share of the value of the work is asking the questions that surface concerns they hadn’t articulated yet.

From there, I draft documents tailored to the situation, walk through them in plain language so the client understands what each provision does, make revisions, and then handle the execution formalities (signing, witnessing, notarization) that New York requires for a valid will or trust. For trusts, the work continues after execution – assets need to be retitled into the trust, beneficiary designations need to align, and the plan needs to be reviewed periodically as life changes.

The plan is most useful if it gets reviewed every few years and updated when life events happen – births, deaths, divorces, significant changes in assets, moves to a different state. Plans drafted decades ago and never updated are one of the most common sources of bad outcomes I see.

I work out of Melville, NY and serve families across Long Island, the five boroughs, Westchester, and the broader New York metro. New York’s estate law has its own quirks – the state’s lower estate tax exemption with its notorious “cliff,” specific Surrogate’s Court procedures that vary by county, and a body of trust and estate law that’s distinct from neighboring states. For families with ties or property in more than one state, the planning gets more complicated and worth doing carefully. Useful starting points if you want to read on your own: the New York State Bar Association Trusts & Estates Section, the IRS estate and gift tax page, and the National Academy of Elder Law Attorneys. None of those replace planning tied to your specific family.

If you’ve been meaning to do this and haven’t, or if you have a plan from years ago that probably needs updating, that’s the right time to have the conversation. Schedule a consultation and we’ll talk through where you are, who you’re trying to take care of, and what makes sense from here.