One aspect of day-to-day life that seemingly changed overnight sometime in March 2020 was the exodus of office workers retreating to their homes to work remotely for the foreseeable future. Trusts and estates attorneys were, and still are, included in this group of office workers who are remotely working from home until the pandemic makes it safe to return to the office.
Thankfully, many of my day-to-day tasks, such as drafting trusts and other estate-planning documents, discussing estate-planning techniques (both in the abstract and as applicable to a client-specific scenario) with others in our practice group and attending client conference calls, were tasks that could be managed and accomplished at home just as easily as at the office. Our practice group at Kirkland & Ellis has always been spread across three offices—New York, Chicago and San Francisco—and anyone in our group will tell you that even before the pandemic, we were accustomed to executing our day-to-day business “remotely” from one another before the pandemic hit. Unlike some practice groups, our group has never all been in the same building (or even the same time zone!), so picking up the phone has always been the primary means of communication, rather than knocking on someone’s door. In this way, transitioning to remote work was rather seamless for our group.
Videoconferencing
As with many other office workers and attorneys, our group has called on Zoom videoconferencing far more often than we had in the past. Many client calls, especially those in the initial planning stages in which we aim to tackle the “big picture” issues of discerning estate-planning goals, discussing family dynamics and then providing an overview of wealth transfer techniques that may make sense given the former, have proven to be better suited to a Zoom call, where reading body language and facial expressions can make communication more efficient than a phone call would. For other calls in which the goal is to tackle a discrete issue (whether internal or with clients and/or their financial advisors), a quick phone call still works just as well.
Getting Signatures
Certain aspects of our practice inevitably did become a bit more difficult or complex. Trusts and estates practices deal with more paper and hard documents than other practice groups. I think (perhaps naively so) that some of my corporate colleagues have never sent a client a paper document to sign! We don’t always have that option—for example, generally speaking, an original signed will must be submitted with the probate court on the testator’s death, so a PDF of the signed will doesn’t suffice. Typically, when we were in office, if I wasn’t meeting a client to sign in person, I would send them their will to sign, and they would send it back to me at my office address. Now, with our practice support and attorneys working remotely, this takes a few extra steps and requires a bit of coordination. Luckily, the coordination among the folks working in the mailroom at the office, our attorneys and our practice support has been great, allowing us to send documents for signing and then retrieve them and store them in our files, largely uninterrupted.
The execution of many estate-planning documents requires “disinterested” witnesses (that is, not related to the testator or mentioned in their documents) and/or a notary. However, social distancing has become one of the primary means to curb the pandemic. Because the concepts of signing your documents while in the presence of someone and social distancing are usually mutually exclusive, signing has become more complicated. While some clients have gotten creative, having neighbors witness their will signings through windows or a glass door, many states have responded by enacting measures to allow testators to have their estate-planning documents witnessed and/or notarized via videoconferencing platforms such as Zoom. These measures have proven to be both a godsend and another hurdle in the effort to have a client’s estate plan completed. Because our practice group has attorneys spread across (and barred in) many different states, we’ve had to keep abreast of the peculiarities of many different states’ remote witnessing/notarizing measures. It’s a tricky task to make sure one is complying with the detailed calls of each of these measures. Further complicating matters, some of these measures are “temporary,” but have been periodically renewed as the pandemic drags on far longer than any of us had anticipated. However, without these measures in place, it would no doubt be much more difficult to have clients complete and sign their estate-planning documents during the pandemic.
Returning to “Normal”
We’re very fortunate that we’ve been able to continue our practice and work in a way that’s safe during this time. My hope is that, once life begins to settle back into some sense of normalcy, certain aspects of working remotely will continue to be employed as necessary, so that our practice runs more efficiently than it did this time last year. For example, hopefully, now that everyone is comfortable using Zoom, video calls will be more normalized and will ease difficult travel schedules for meetings and execution ceremonies. I hope that everyone remains safe and healthy until this normalcy starts to settle in.