What should you know before contacting an attorney? Hi, I’m Sarah Siedentopf. I’m an estate planning and probate attorney in Atlanta, Georgia. And this one is fairly easy because you don’t have to necessarily know very much before starting the process and contacting an estate planning attorney.

The first thing you do need to know is, what are your goals? Why are you contacting an estate planning attorney? What are you hoping to achieve? Because if you can clearly articulate what you want to achieve, they will be able to help you do that much more efficiently and much more effectively than otherwise.

The second thing that you do need to know is, what do you own? So in a general sense, we need to know what is the net worth of your entire estate? But in a specific sense, we need to know what types of assets are we dealing with? That doesn’t mean that you have to write down all of the account numbers and all of these nitpicky details before meeting with an estate planning attorney. But it does mean that you should have a general overview of what do we own, and what is it worth in a large overview sense?

The last thing that you have to know is, who are your family and your loved ones that you were hoping to benefit? And sometimes the answer is my family and my loved ones are different people. And that is something that we’ll need to communicate to the estate planning attorney so that that attorney can figure out are we going to have any conflicts? If so, how do we avoid these conflicts? But in general, knowing who it is that you want to benefit because they are your loved ones, your relations, that sort of thing is very important.

So what are your goals? What do you own and who do you love? It’s a pretty simple setup process for what do you need to know before contacting an estate attorney? So none of this should stop you from moving forward. If you have more questions about this I would love to hear from you.

And please, if you have any comments I love to hear those too, thank you.