Wills & Estates
Integrative lawyers look at wills and estates as an opportunity for their clients to continue their legacy beyond simply passing down wealth.
One example, the Purposeful Planning Institute, created a framework that is part of a training program for attorneys, financial planners, and trustees.
Traditional estate planning tends to reduce a life to a list of assets and beneficiaries. Integrative estate lawyers instead treat a will or estate plan as a chance to have a genuinely meaningful conversation with a client about what — and who — they love, and how they want to be remembered.
Rhiannon Thomas, founder of Milkwood Law in Cape Town, South Africa, brought the principles of Narrative Therapy into last wills, working alongside a clinical psychologist and a family counselor. Narrative Therapy treats the client as the expert in their own life story and externalizes the problem, so it can be examined separately from the client themselves. Using that lens, Thomas helps clients think more deeply about the story behind the document — what their legacy actually means to them, and to the people they’re leaving it to — rather than simply filling in the legally required blanks.
John A. Warnick, a self-described “recovering tax attorney” who spent thirty years as a private-client lawyer before leaving his firm in 2010, took a parallel approach further into the trust document itself. Warnick founded the Purposeful Planning Institute (PPI) to do two things: share best practices among lawyers, financial planners, trustees, and family-office professionals who serve legacy families, and foster real collaboration among the different disciplines those families rely on.
His central idea, the Purposeful Trust™, is drafted in the client’s own first-person voice, with text boxes that capture their intentions in their own words, so that even if the legal boilerplate were stripped away, a family would still recognize it as their loved one’s legacy — built around what Warnick calls the Six Paradigms of Purposeful Planning and the Seven Keys of the Purposeful Trust.
Warnick’s approach includes giving the trust a meaningful name, plain-English explanations alongside the necessary tax planning, and “Guidelights” — the client’s own life lessons and wisdom for their beneficiaries and trustee — which, he argues, can end up mattering more to a family than the assets themselves. He was profiled in a 2014 New York Times piece by Paul Sullivan, “Focusing on the Human Element of Estate Planning,” which opens with a line every trust-and-estate lawyer recognizes: everyone has a story about a trust-fund beneficiary who embodies the worst traits of a spoiled rich kid — and asks whether better-designed trusts might be part of the reason why.
Purposeful Planning is so revolutionary, I traced them back to George Washington.
John A. Warnick is the founder of the Purposeful Planning Institute
