Clients who are engaged in a divorce proceeding or are even contemplating a divorce may put their estate-planning attorneys in a difficult position if they ask to change something in their estate plan. Depending on various factors, such as the state the client resides in and whether the estate-planning attorney represented both clients, these changes may not be permissible and can create a legal minefield. For example, a client may want their attorney to help hide assets. Even if the requested action isn’t illegal, it may result in unintended consequences. In their article “Divorce Planning: What You Can Do, What You Can’t Do and What You Should Do,” p. 32, Ella R. Cohen and Thomas Benhamou explain the challenges involved for attorneys in this situation and detail what actions are and aren’t permitted as well as actions that may be permitted but are unadvisable.
Even outside of divorce court, clients’ expectations on what their attorneys can legally do and how fast they should do it have increased with the many modes of communication (for example, text, emails and cellphones) and the information that’s available at our clients’ fingertips. Given this onslaught, what’s an attorney’s standard of care? Meredith B. Martin and Louis S. Harrison attempt to answer this question in their article, “Revisiting the Estate-Planning Attorney’s Standard of Care in the Age of Artificial and Actual Intelligence: Part I,” p. 48. They argue for more realistic benchmarks for what constitutes the standard of care for an estate planner.
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