take my roles as both a draftsman and a counselor seriously. As a draftsman, I custom draft every document that leaves my office. I work from forms that I myself have put together carefully and painstakingly; I never use a form book, any commercially-available draft, or a form devised by somebody else. I am, moreover, constantly updating my forms to make sure that they incorporate the latest tax law and probate or other relevant law. I eschew document-production software in favor of working from word processing files that contain all the relevant language—language that experience has shown me is most suitable and useful for the document in question. My experience with document-production software has been that it never works seamlessly, and that the time saved by being able to assemble, say, a simple will by hitting only a few keystrokes is ultimately not worth very much because the resulting document either contains awkward transitions from paragraph to paragraph and article to article, or does not say precisely what I need it to say, or (most commonly) both.

While I could produce documents more quickly using off-the-shelf forms or document-production software, those documents would not be crafted with the particular care and attention that I prefer to give to every client. On the other hand, it would of course be totally inefficient to draft every will by starting with a blank page and writing the document from scratch. My method of assembling every document by manually choosing each paragraph from a selection of paragraphs, each of which I myself have drafted, while, when the need arises, drafting certain provisions or transitions between paragraphs entirely from scratch, achieves an optimal balance: I can draft very quickly and still produce documents that are crafted to address each client's particular needs.

It is also necessary, when drafting estate planning documents, to achieve a reasonable balance between legal precision and readability. The bias here must necessarily be in favor of legal precision, with the perhaps unfortunate but necessary result that most clients are not going to understand every word of their new will or trust, especially some of the more technical tax provisions such as marital deduction formulae. I have ten years' experience teaching English at the college level—five as a graduate student at Columbia University and five as an English professor—and this experience has proved very useful in making the documents I draft readable and elegant. On the other hand, as with any legal document, the estate planning documents I draft must, first and foremost, be able to withstand legal challenges. Their legal effectiveness is, quite simply, much more important than their readability. It is far preferable to have a legally airtight provision that is more or less inscrutable to the layperson than to have a chatty, easily readable provision that does not use the precise legal language the situation requires, and thus would be open to challenge in court.

While I must, as a draftsman, sometimes insert into a will or a trust language that is overly technical or opaque to the uninitiated, as a counselor I am able to explain to my client why that language is necessary. I take great pride in developing a personal relationship with each client, and I like to get to know each client on a personal as well as a professional level. It is far easier for me to articulate a client's wishes in an estate plan if I know and understand the client's concerns regarding family and loved ones, on the one hand, and business and finance, on the other. Some clients come to me with very distinct notions of what their goals are for an estate plan and what they want their documents to look like, and for these clients, my counseling role might be limited to suggesting tax-savings devices and appropriate descent and distribution language for each specific provision in the will and trust or trusts. Other clients, however, come to me with no clear idea even of whom they want to receive their property upon their death; for these clients, my counseling role is altogether more involved, and can help to shape some of the client's most basic decisions, such as whether gifts to charity ought to be a significant part of the estate plan, or if saving on transfer taxes is even a concern at all.

As a counselor, I give due deference and accord to my clients' wishes, but, on the other hand, I am always mindful of the fact that the old adage "the customer is always right" frequently does not apply in the context of estate planning. This is a field that can be highly technical, and expertise takes years to acquire. It is very often the case that even clients who can fully articulate the goals of their estate plan and who know exactly what they want to have happen don't know how to achieve it. Is a revocable trust or an irrevocable trust appropriate? Would an outright gift make more sense than a gift in trust? What is the best way to ensure that the grandchildren will be able to enjoy the family vacation home when they are grown? Would an installment sale to a grantor trust or a transfer to a grantor-retained annuity trust be the best way of freezing the value of that particular asset for transfer tax purposes? These are the kinds of questions that I am frequently called upon to answer as a counselor.

My philosophy as an estate planning attorney is that the client always comes first, and I will use my counseling and drafting skills to the best of my ability in order to ensure that every one of my clients has an estate plan that does exactly what he or she needs and wants it to do. In addition to my roles as draftsman and counselor, I also take on the role of litigator when a matter arises in an estate or trust that requires litigation, and as fiduciary, when a client requests that I serve as trustee, executor, health care agent, or attorney-in-fact. I put one hundred percent of myself and my effort into each of these roles, and my clients know that they can rely upon me.

As a probate litigator, I am tenacious. I handle will contests, actions for breach of fiduciary duty, trust reformations, and other matters that arise in the administration of an estate or a trust. Litigation utilizes a different set of skills than drafting estate planning documents, and in writing a trial brief or an appeal brief, or even a simple motion, I use the same kinds of argumentative skills that I developed in the course of a significant academic career. Litigation tends to average about ten percent of my workload, but it can get up to over fifty percent, and I typically have at least one case in litigation mode.

As a professional trustee, I am always mindful of the various legal duties that apply to any fiduciary, and I adhere to them with "the punctilio of an honor the most sensitive," to quote Judge Cardozo's famous description of the standard expected of a trustee (Meinhard v. Salmon, 249 N.Y. 458 (1928)). Since I am no expert in investments, when I act as trustee, I always hire outside experts for investment purposes. My experience as a litigator in pursuing actions for breach of fiduciary duty, moreover, makes me all the more aware of the proper standards of behavior of a professional fiduciary. I never waver from those standards.