Short answer: Pick an attorney whose practice is limited to (or heavily weighted toward) estate planning, not someone who drafts a will between personal injury cases. Ask upfront how they charge, flat fee or hourly, and get that in writing before you sign anything. Then use a short initial consultation to confirm they explain trusts, wills, and taxes in plain language instead of jargon. If any of that feels off, keep looking.
Why does it matter if an attorney’s practice is limited to estate planning?
Estate planning touches trust law, probate procedure, property tax rules, and federal tax code all at once. An attorney who handles car accidents on Monday and drafts trusts on Tuesday is not tracking the same body of law as someone whose docket is estate plans, trust administrations, and probate cases every week. That does not mean a generalist can never do competent work. It means the odds of them catching a California-specific wrinkle, a property tax reassessment trigger, a funding gap in a trust, a beneficiary designation that contradicts the will, go down when estate planning is a side practice rather than the main one.
Ask directly: what percentage of your practice is estate planning, trust administration, and probate? A vague answer is itself useful information.
How much experience should the attorney have?
Law school teaches the framework. Years of actual drafting, funding trusts, and handling administrations after clients die is where an attorney learns what breaks. An attorney who has only drafted a handful of trusts has not yet seen what happens when a trust is never funded, when a beneficiary contests an amendment, or when a blended family’s expectations collide with the document as written. There is no substitute for volume and time in the chair. Ask how long they have been doing this work and how many plans or administrations they have handled.
How do estate planning attorneys typically charge, and what should you ask about fees?
Most estate planning attorneys in California bill one of two ways: a flat fee for a defined package of documents, or an hourly rate for work that cannot be scoped in advance, like a contested trust administration. Neither approach is inherently better, but you should know which one applies to your matter before you sign an engagement letter. Ridley Law, for example, charges a flat fee of $4,100 for a married couple’s complete trust-based plan and $3,700 for a single person, and bills $500 an hour when hourly billing applies, such as trust administration disputes. Ask any attorney you are considering for the same level of specificity.
Fees matter for a second reason: they are a preview of what happens if your estate ends up in probate instead of a properly funded trust. California sets probate compensation on a statutory sliding scale under Probate Code §§ 10800 and 10810, and the executor and the estate’s attorney are each entitled to the same schedule. On a $1,000,000 estate, that schedule produces roughly $23,000 for the executor and another $23,000 for the attorney, about $46,000 in ordinary statutory fees before court costs, bond premiums, or extraordinary fees for things like selling real property. An attorney who cannot walk you through numbers like that, and explain how a funded trust avoids them, is not giving you the full picture. Our fee structure page lays out flat-fee and hourly billing in more detail, and our probate page walks through what court-supervised administration actually costs and how long it runs.
Figures verified July 2026.
What should the attorney know about taxes and long-term care planning?
A competent estate planning attorney should be conversant in how gift, estate, and income tax basis rules interact with your plan, and should be able to explain, in plain terms, what a revocable trust does and does not do for long-term care eligibility. If an attorney cannot answer basic questions about how these pieces fit together, or waves off the question entirely, that is worth noting. You do not need an attorney who moonlights as a CPA, but you need one who knows enough to flag issues and bring in other professionals when the matter calls for it.
What should happen during the initial consultation?
A short consultation should tell you most of what you need to know. Come with your goals stated plainly: who inherits what, who you want managing things if you cannot, and any complications like a blended family, a special needs beneficiary, or property in more than one state. Listen for how the attorney responds. Do they ask follow-up questions specific to your situation, or recite a generic pitch? Do they explain terms like “successor trustee” or “pour-over will” without you having to ask, or do they let jargon sit unexplained? An attorney who cannot make this understandable to you now will not make trust administration understandable to your family later.
What red flags should make you keep looking?
Watch for an attorney who will not commit to a fee structure until after the first meeting, who cannot describe their own experience level with any specificity, or whose explanations leave you more confused than when you walked in. A good estate planning relationship often lasts years, through amendments, life changes, and eventually administration. If something feels off at the first meeting, it is reasonable to keep looking rather than talk yourself into it.
What to do next
Ask two or three candidates the same questions: what share of their practice is estate planning, how they charge, and how they would structure a plan for your specific situation. Compare not just the answers but how clearly each one is explained. A consultation with an estate planning attorney is a reasonable place to start, and most firms, including ours, offer one at no cost and with no obligation.
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