For your first meeting with an estate planning attorney, bring a family information sheet, a list of your assets and debts with titling and beneficiary designations noted, copies of any existing wills, trusts, powers of attorney, or marital agreements, an inventory of your digital accounts, and your preliminary choices for guardians, beneficiaries, and fiduciaries. Knowing what to bring to your first estate attorney meeting is largely about doing the inventory work in advance so the lawyer can spend the hour on strategy instead of fact-finding. Most initial consultations run 30 to 60 minutes, and the more organized you arrive, the more useful that time becomes.
Family and Personal Information
Write down the full legal names, dates of birth, addresses, and contact information for yourself, your spouse or partner, and every child. Include stepchildren, grandchildren, and any other dependents. Family structure drives legal obligations in ways that aren’t always obvious, so the attorney needs this even if you don’t plan to leave anyone out.
If you’ve been divorced or widowed, bring the divorce decree, separation agreement, or death certificate. A divorce decree may contain provisions about life insurance or retirement beneficiaries that override whatever you put in a new will. Dates of prior marriages matter, and so does whether any support or property obligations from them still apply.
Guardianship Choices for Minor Children
If you have children under 18, come with at least one or two names of people you’d trust to raise them, plus a backup. This decision stalls more estate plans than any other because parents postpone it. A good-enough choice written down beats a perfect choice that stays in your head. Think about whether the person shares your general approach to parenting, lives somewhere your children could reasonably settle, and is physically and financially able. Consider their spouse too, since that person will inevitably be involved. If both parents are planning together, talk it through before the meeting. Disagreements about guardianship in the attorney’s office burn consultation time quickly.
A List of Assets With Titling and Beneficiaries
Put together a list of what you own, with the approximate current value of each item and, critically, how it’s titled. Titling is the single most overlooked detail in estate planning, and it controls more than your will does in many situations.
- Bank accounts (checking, savings, money market, CDs), noting whether each is individual, joint, or has a payable-on-death beneficiary.
- Investment and brokerage accounts, including any transfer-on-death designations.
- Retirement accounts (401(k)s, IRAs, pensions, 403(b)s) with the named beneficiaries on each.
- Real estate: address, estimated value, and exactly how title is held. Individual ownership, joint tenancy with right of survivorship, tenancy in common, and community property all produce different outcomes at death.
- Business interests: ownership stakes in partnerships, LLCs, or corporations, along with any buy-sell agreements.
- Valuable personal property: vehicles, jewelry, art, collections, anything worth enough to fight over.
- Life insurance and annuities: policy numbers, face values, and named beneficiaries.
- Long-term care and disability policies, which affect how your estate handles incapacity costs.
Why Titling Deserves This Much Attention
Beneficiary designations on retirement accounts, life insurance, and POD/TOD accounts override your will. If your will says your daughter gets your IRA but the beneficiary form still lists your ex-spouse, your ex-spouse gets the IRA. The will loses every time. This problem usually surfaces only after death, when it’s too late to fix.
Jointly held assets with a right of survivorship pass automatically to the surviving owner, bypassing probate. Assets in your name alone, with no beneficiary designation, go through probate and are distributed according to your will or, if there isn’t one, under state intestacy law. Accurate titling information lets the attorney spot these conflicts early and recommend fixes while they’re still cheap.
A List of Debts
Your estate plan has to account for what you owe. List mortgages, home equity lines, auto loans, student loans, personal loans, and credit card balances. For each, note the creditor, approximate balance, and any co-signer or guarantor. Flag whether the debt is secured by specific property.
Debts don’t disappear at death. They become obligations of your estate, which can shrink what your beneficiaries actually receive. A mortgage on a jointly held home, for example, creates complications that are far easier to plan around in advance than to untangle later.
Any Estate or Legal Documents You Already Have
If you’ve done any planning before, bring everything, even if you think it’s outdated. The attorney needs to see what’s in place before recommending changes.
- Prior wills and trusts, including handwritten (holographic) wills.
- Financial and healthcare powers of attorney.
- Advance directives or living wills.
- Prenuptial or postnuptial agreements, which can restrict what you’re allowed to do with certain assets.
- Real estate deeds showing how each property is titled.
- Partnership agreements, LLC operating agreements, shareholder agreements, and buy-sell agreements.
- Any trust documents where you’re named as a beneficiary.
Bring copies rather than originals when possible. Your attorney may want to mark documents up during the meeting, and you don’t want original signatures covered in annotations.
Ask About a HIPAA Authorization
A healthcare power of attorney lets someone make medical decisions for you, but it doesn’t automatically give that person access to your medical records. Under federal privacy rules, healthcare providers generally cannot share your protected health information with family members unless you’ve authorized it or are present and able to agree.1GovInfo. 45 CFR 164.510 – Uses and Disclosures Requiring an Opportunity for the Individual to Agree or to Object Ask about including a separate HIPAA authorization naming the people you want to have access. Without it, your healthcare agent could be making decisions about your treatment without being able to review your full medical history.
A Digital Account Inventory
This is the category most people forget. Make a list of your digital accounts by type: email, social media, cloud storage, cryptocurrency wallets, online banking and brokerage logins, subscription services, domain names, and any blogs or websites you own. For accounts with real monetary value, like cryptocurrency or online brokerage holdings, add them to your financial asset list as well.
Don’t bring passwords to the meeting. Instead, be ready to describe how you plan to store and share credentials. A password manager with an emergency contact, a sealed letter kept with your estate documents, or a dedicated digital vault service are all approaches the attorney can work into the plan.
Nearly all states have adopted some version of the Revised Uniform Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act, which lets your directions in a will or trust override the default terms of service on most platforms. If you say nothing, the platform’s terms control what happens to your account. The attorney can draft provisions saying which accounts your fiduciary should access, which should be deleted, and which should be memorialized.
Your Picks for Beneficiaries and Fiduciaries
The most productive part of your first meeting will be deciding who gets what and who’s in charge. Come with at least preliminary answers.
Beneficiaries
Write down the full legal name and relationship of every person or organization you want to receive something. Think beyond the obvious: friends, charities, religious institutions. Decide whether any gifts should come with conditions, like reaching a certain age. If you plan to treat children unequally, say so now rather than hoping the attorney reads between the lines. Unequal distributions are legal but need to be clearly documented to reduce the chance of a challenge.
Fiduciaries
A fiduciary is anyone you appoint to manage some aspect of your estate or personal affairs. You’ll need names for several roles:
- Executor or personal representative, who shepherds your estate through probate, pays debts, and distributes assets.
- Trustee, who manages trust assets according to your instructions. This can be the same person as your executor, but doesn’t have to be.
- Financial power of attorney agent, who handles finances if you’re incapacitated while still alive.
- Healthcare power of attorney agent, who makes medical decisions on your behalf.
- Guardian for minor children.
Name a successor for every role. If your first-choice executor dies before you do, or your trustee becomes incapacitated, the court will have to appoint a replacement if you haven’t named one. That process takes time, costs money, and may produce a result you wouldn’t have chosen.
Tax Figures Worth Knowing
You don’t need to be a tax expert, but a few numbers shape the conversation. The federal estate tax exemption for 2026 is $15,000,000 per person, following the One, Big, Beautiful Bill Act signed into law in 2025.2Internal Revenue Service. Whats New – Estate and Gift Tax This exemption has no sunset provision. Amounts above the exemption are taxed at a top rate of 40%.3Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 26 USC 2001 – Imposition and Rate of Tax For most people the federal estate tax won’t apply, but if your estate is anywhere near that threshold, the meeting becomes partly a tax-planning conversation.
Married couples get portability: if the first spouse to die doesn’t use the full exemption, the survivor can claim the unused portion, but only if the executor files Form 706. If no return is filed, the unused exemption is lost. Mention portability to your attorney if your combined estate could trigger tax at the second death.
The annual gift tax exclusion for 2026 is $19,000 per recipient.4Internal Revenue Service. IRS Releases Tax Inflation Adjustments for Tax Year 2026, Including Amendments From the One, Big, Beautiful Bill If you’ve been making large gifts, bring records so the attorney can calculate how much of your lifetime exemption you’ve already used. If you own property in more than one state, say so, because some states impose their own estate or inheritance taxes at thresholds well below the federal level.
Questions Worth Asking at the Meeting
Most attorneys charge for initial consultations, with fees ranging from free to a few hundred dollars. Ask when you schedule so there’s no surprise. Some firms apply the consultation fee toward the total if you hire them.
For the planning work, simple wills and powers of attorney are often flat-fee. Revocable living trusts cost more because they involve customization and often retitling of assets. Complex estates with business interests, blended families, or tax planning are sometimes billed hourly. Ask upfront how the attorney charges and what the estimated total will be.
Good questions to ask early: how much of the attorney’s practice is devoted to estate planning, how many plans they’ve drafted in the past year, and whether the firm also handles trust administration and probate. An attorney who sees how plans perform after death tends to build better ones. Ask who at the firm will do the drafting and who your point of contact will be if questions come up later. Those details matter more than most clients realize until they’re mid-process and can’t get a return phone call.