Our Story
In a nutshell:
For 22 years, we have walked beside family leaders, helping them to lay the foundations for inter-generational success...
Here is the story....
For 22 years, we have walked beside family leaders, helping them to lay the foundations for inter-generational success...
Here is the story....
Q. Matt, what is your background?
After graduating from Stanford Law School, and a brief stint as a corporate litigator, I started an estate planning practice 22 years ago. My practice grew to be comprised of highly successful business owners and high-tech executives. I was routinely dealing with estates of $20 million and above. It was good work, but something was missing.
Q. Missing? What do you mean?
One day I was sitting in my office reflecting on an initial client meeting with a couple in their late 50s. I had talked with the clients about their children for a bit and I learned that they had a daughter in her late 20s who was married and had a child and a son in his early 20s who had struggled to find himself, but was beginning to create some stability and forward progress in his life. I listened carefully, as I always do, and then the conversation naturally moved on to estate taxes - as it usually did. I explained how estate taxes worked and diagramed a structure that would save these clients (or more accurately their heirs) significant amounts of money and would take into account a bit of what they had told me about their children’s situation. It was, by all normal standards, a successful meeting. However, I was not satisfied.
What nagged at me in my office afterwards was an issue that had increasingly come to bother me as my practice become more and more sophisticated.
I had noticed for some time that the air went out of the room when we started talking about taxes and what I considered - and my fellow estate planning attorneys consider - to be the heart of the legal work to be done. As I explained the tax implications, my clients’ eyes would glaze over and they became far more polite and less engaged. I suspected that if anyone asked them to repeat what I had said just a few hours later, it was highly unlikely that they would have been able to do so with any real accuracy. This was not because I was bad at explaining estate taxes - I have been told that I am quite good at it. What I realized, though, was that both the clients and I were engaged in a kind of weird Kabuki theater in which were each pretending that estate taxes were the real reason we were there. My epiphany as I was sitting in my office was that estate taxes were at best a side show. The main event was far more interesting.
Q: What do you mean "main event"?
There is something more central to the estate planning process than taxes. I remember early in my career, when I was working with families with young children, that I was acutely aware that these conversations were occurring in the shadow of my client’s confrontation with their own mortality. The issue of guardianship for these parents had implicated all sorts of issues with respect to values, communication and conversations that mattered about family, friends and even patterns of engagement between the parents themselves. If you are a parent yourself, you can appreciate that this decision of who will care for your young children if you cannot is fraught with deeply personal questions that you ordinarily gloss over in the course of daily life. Sometimes these conversations with clients were painful, and sometimes not, but in every conversation I had with clients, we were all moving at the edges of what had heart and meaning for them and there was a clarity and aliveness to these discussions that signaled we were getting closer to the issues that truly mattered.
Sitting in my office, I realized that my meetings with clients had lost this living edge. Here clients were talking about the things that gave their lives meaning and significance and about the things that mattered most to them (such as family and businesses) and we were glossing over these to make room for discussion about taxes. It felt to me a bit like we were perpetually tuning violins when we had the opportunity to play great music together.
Q. So what did you do?
That day I changed how I worked with clients. I committed to not bring up estate taxes in the first meeting unless it was the only thing that clients wanted to talk about. I also committed to host the conversation that clients wanted to have and go as deep as possible into that (as they allowed) no matter how messy it might be. My professional training in counseling from my former career as a minister and my experience as an organizational consultant, not to mention the fact that I had worked with many messy situations in the course of my career, gave me the confidence to know that I had the capacity to hold these conversations with a degree of skill and kindness and that I did not need to allow my fear of getting too personal to dissuade me from engaging in this deeper work.
Q. What happened next?
What I quickly found was that clients began to really deal with the questions that mattered most to them. They expressed their fears, their dreams, their aspirations, their failures, and their triumphs. Sometimes it got a bit messy, but we worked through each problem as it arose. Most of the time, though, it led to far deeper insights and much greater integration than I could have dreamed possible. In all of this my clients and I would co-design estate plans that were integrally related to their own lives and very specifically designed to address long term needs of the human dynamics of their specific family situations. I told them that I would address the technical issues of estate taxes and present alternatives when appropriate, but that these technical problems were relatively easy to solve once we had done the harder work of creating a plan that had the right structures and the right levels of flexibility for their family. I found that they were happy with this and listened much more closely when the tax issues arose as they inevitably did. I also found that I was designing estate plans that were likely to stand the test of time. Many estate planning attorneys have a sneaking suspicion that traditional planning does more harm than good to the generations that are saddled with antiquated structures. There is a lot of evidence to support that suspicion. While saving estate taxes is important, creating structures that perpetuate dependence and dysfunction seem very shortsighted. Instead, we found that we were creating structures that rewarded independence, accountability and responsibility to the family and the broader world. These plans put control and power into the hands of family members in ways that would help ensure that we were not doing harm.
Q. What was the result?
As I did this work with my clients and their families (I soon was involving multiple generations in the planning process for all sorts of practical and philosophical reasons), I discovered early on that the estate planning process was simply not big enough to hold the conversations that really needed to occur within families. We were enshrining an estate planning structure based on a snapshot in time when what we really needed to be doing was moving the family forward internally to make it as strong as possible and fulfill its deepest promise of contribution to the world. So we began designing and holding extended retreats and family meetings with families. At these family meetings and retreats, we would struggle together to communicate, clarify values and then talk through neccessary outcomes that we could move towards. Sometimes this involved legal work, often it did not. But it was infinitely more rewarding than merely drafting documents and my clients saw the value and responded to it.
Eventually I left the practice of law to devote myself full time to this important work. In doing this work, I bring my entire background into play. My work is multidisciplinary and we bring to it a deep background not only in professional services but in organizational development, psychology, systems theory, communications, and other approaches that weave seamlessly into authentic interactions with tangible results for our clients. The end result is that we create far greater functionality in families around issues of business and wealth that ensures that gains in one generation will be sustained and built upon in the next.
Q. What is Marcia's role?
Marcia and I have been married for 37 years and are life partners at home and in business. Marcia has been a therapist for 34 years and is a licensed psychologist in Washington and California. In our work she tends to take a behind the scenes role by providing strategic advice on how to deal with particular kinds of family dynamics and is intimately involved in any testing we do. I also rely on her for developing particular exercises and engagement approaches with each of our client families. Occasionally she will assist in facilitating family discussions or working with individuals in the family who need particularly intense coaching or even therapy. I could not do this work without her and her involvement is integral to my approach to working with clients.
After graduating from Stanford Law School, and a brief stint as a corporate litigator, I started an estate planning practice 22 years ago. My practice grew to be comprised of highly successful business owners and high-tech executives. I was routinely dealing with estates of $20 million and above. It was good work, but something was missing.
Q. Missing? What do you mean?
One day I was sitting in my office reflecting on an initial client meeting with a couple in their late 50s. I had talked with the clients about their children for a bit and I learned that they had a daughter in her late 20s who was married and had a child and a son in his early 20s who had struggled to find himself, but was beginning to create some stability and forward progress in his life. I listened carefully, as I always do, and then the conversation naturally moved on to estate taxes - as it usually did. I explained how estate taxes worked and diagramed a structure that would save these clients (or more accurately their heirs) significant amounts of money and would take into account a bit of what they had told me about their children’s situation. It was, by all normal standards, a successful meeting. However, I was not satisfied.
What nagged at me in my office afterwards was an issue that had increasingly come to bother me as my practice become more and more sophisticated.
I had noticed for some time that the air went out of the room when we started talking about taxes and what I considered - and my fellow estate planning attorneys consider - to be the heart of the legal work to be done. As I explained the tax implications, my clients’ eyes would glaze over and they became far more polite and less engaged. I suspected that if anyone asked them to repeat what I had said just a few hours later, it was highly unlikely that they would have been able to do so with any real accuracy. This was not because I was bad at explaining estate taxes - I have been told that I am quite good at it. What I realized, though, was that both the clients and I were engaged in a kind of weird Kabuki theater in which were each pretending that estate taxes were the real reason we were there. My epiphany as I was sitting in my office was that estate taxes were at best a side show. The main event was far more interesting.
Q: What do you mean "main event"?
There is something more central to the estate planning process than taxes. I remember early in my career, when I was working with families with young children, that I was acutely aware that these conversations were occurring in the shadow of my client’s confrontation with their own mortality. The issue of guardianship for these parents had implicated all sorts of issues with respect to values, communication and conversations that mattered about family, friends and even patterns of engagement between the parents themselves. If you are a parent yourself, you can appreciate that this decision of who will care for your young children if you cannot is fraught with deeply personal questions that you ordinarily gloss over in the course of daily life. Sometimes these conversations with clients were painful, and sometimes not, but in every conversation I had with clients, we were all moving at the edges of what had heart and meaning for them and there was a clarity and aliveness to these discussions that signaled we were getting closer to the issues that truly mattered.
Sitting in my office, I realized that my meetings with clients had lost this living edge. Here clients were talking about the things that gave their lives meaning and significance and about the things that mattered most to them (such as family and businesses) and we were glossing over these to make room for discussion about taxes. It felt to me a bit like we were perpetually tuning violins when we had the opportunity to play great music together.
Q. So what did you do?
That day I changed how I worked with clients. I committed to not bring up estate taxes in the first meeting unless it was the only thing that clients wanted to talk about. I also committed to host the conversation that clients wanted to have and go as deep as possible into that (as they allowed) no matter how messy it might be. My professional training in counseling from my former career as a minister and my experience as an organizational consultant, not to mention the fact that I had worked with many messy situations in the course of my career, gave me the confidence to know that I had the capacity to hold these conversations with a degree of skill and kindness and that I did not need to allow my fear of getting too personal to dissuade me from engaging in this deeper work.
Q. What happened next?
What I quickly found was that clients began to really deal with the questions that mattered most to them. They expressed their fears, their dreams, their aspirations, their failures, and their triumphs. Sometimes it got a bit messy, but we worked through each problem as it arose. Most of the time, though, it led to far deeper insights and much greater integration than I could have dreamed possible. In all of this my clients and I would co-design estate plans that were integrally related to their own lives and very specifically designed to address long term needs of the human dynamics of their specific family situations. I told them that I would address the technical issues of estate taxes and present alternatives when appropriate, but that these technical problems were relatively easy to solve once we had done the harder work of creating a plan that had the right structures and the right levels of flexibility for their family. I found that they were happy with this and listened much more closely when the tax issues arose as they inevitably did. I also found that I was designing estate plans that were likely to stand the test of time. Many estate planning attorneys have a sneaking suspicion that traditional planning does more harm than good to the generations that are saddled with antiquated structures. There is a lot of evidence to support that suspicion. While saving estate taxes is important, creating structures that perpetuate dependence and dysfunction seem very shortsighted. Instead, we found that we were creating structures that rewarded independence, accountability and responsibility to the family and the broader world. These plans put control and power into the hands of family members in ways that would help ensure that we were not doing harm.
Q. What was the result?
As I did this work with my clients and their families (I soon was involving multiple generations in the planning process for all sorts of practical and philosophical reasons), I discovered early on that the estate planning process was simply not big enough to hold the conversations that really needed to occur within families. We were enshrining an estate planning structure based on a snapshot in time when what we really needed to be doing was moving the family forward internally to make it as strong as possible and fulfill its deepest promise of contribution to the world. So we began designing and holding extended retreats and family meetings with families. At these family meetings and retreats, we would struggle together to communicate, clarify values and then talk through neccessary outcomes that we could move towards. Sometimes this involved legal work, often it did not. But it was infinitely more rewarding than merely drafting documents and my clients saw the value and responded to it.
Eventually I left the practice of law to devote myself full time to this important work. In doing this work, I bring my entire background into play. My work is multidisciplinary and we bring to it a deep background not only in professional services but in organizational development, psychology, systems theory, communications, and other approaches that weave seamlessly into authentic interactions with tangible results for our clients. The end result is that we create far greater functionality in families around issues of business and wealth that ensures that gains in one generation will be sustained and built upon in the next.
Q. What is Marcia's role?
Marcia and I have been married for 37 years and are life partners at home and in business. Marcia has been a therapist for 34 years and is a licensed psychologist in Washington and California. In our work she tends to take a behind the scenes role by providing strategic advice on how to deal with particular kinds of family dynamics and is intimately involved in any testing we do. I also rely on her for developing particular exercises and engagement approaches with each of our client families. Occasionally she will assist in facilitating family discussions or working with individuals in the family who need particularly intense coaching or even therapy. I could not do this work without her and her involvement is integral to my approach to working with clients.
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