Estate planning
Estate planning and guardianship
Nearly everyone puts this off, and nearly everyone says the same thing afterward: that was much less awful than I expected. The work exists so that the people you love are not making decisions in the dark.
What most families actually need
For the majority of Oregon households the right package is four documents: a will, a revocable living trust if you own a home, a durable power of attorney for finances, and an advance directive for health care. Together they answer who decides, who inherits and who raises your children.
You do not need a complicated structure to protect an ordinary estate. If someone is selling you one, ask them what specific problem it solves.
Why the trust, and why in Oregon specifically
Oregon probate is not the disaster it is in some states, but it is public, it takes four to twelve months, and it costs a percentage of the estate. A funded revocable trust keeps the house out of that process.
The word funded is doing the work in that sentence. A trust that was drafted but never had the deed transferred into it does nothing at all, and we see that more often than anything else when a family brings us an old plan.
Guardianship, for children and for adults
Naming a guardian for your children in your will is fifteen minutes of work and it is the single most important sentence most parents will ever sign.
We also handle protective proceedings for an adult who can no longer make decisions safely, including guardianship and conservatorship for a parent with dementia and for an adult child with a developmental disability approaching eighteen.
Questions people ask about estate planning
Probably valid, possibly wrong. Bring it in. The usual problems are a named guardian who has since moved across the country and beneficiary designations on retirement accounts that quietly override the will entirely.
You each need your own documents, but couples are planned together and quoted together. It is one process.
Oregon law writes a will for you. It divides your estate by statute, which for a blended family very often produces a result nobody would have chosen, and a judge picks the guardian for your children.
More of them on the common questions page, including cost, timing and what happens on the first call.
The other three
Divorce and separation
Ending a marriage without ending up as strangers who hate each other. Most of our divorces settle at a table, not in a courtroom.
Custody and parenting time
Building a schedule your children can actually live inside, and holding the other parent to it when they will not.
Adoption
The one part of family law that ends in a celebration. Stepparent, agency, foster and second-parent adoptions across Oregon.
Start with a conversation, not a commitment
Twenty minutes on the phone, free, with somebody who will tell you plainly whether you even need a lawyer for this.