Henry David Thoreau once wrote: “Things do not change; we change.” I’m quite sure Thoreau was not writing about estate planning documents at the time, but he might as well have been. While we are constantly changing – jobs, relationships, homes, finances, family – the estate planning documents that have been sitting in a drawer or safe deposit box for years do not. This includes the beneficiary designations in those documents, which designate the people you chose to inherit your 401(k), company stock, and life insurance benefits. (more…)

In October 2010, President Obama signed into law the “Plain Writing Act of 2010.” The law was the latest response to decades of complaints about the incomprehensibility of many government regulations. An Executive Order subsequently signed by the president stated that federal agencies “must ensure that regulations are accessible, consistent, written in plain language, and easy to understand.”

Sadly, no such law applies to attorneys.

Not without reason, members of the legal profession have often been accused of using language that is inaccessible, unnecessarily stilted and complicated, archaic, and confusing. Throw in some gratuitous Latin, and what is often written or said by attorneys may as well be in another language entirely. There’s a reason that “legalese” is a word.

When clients come to me with questions or concerns about a legal issue, they are doing so because...