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There are gifts, and THEN there are gifts. The biggest gift you’ll ever give, however, is the one you won’t see opened: your estate. And though you can’t put it under a tree, with proper planning, and a good estate planning attorney, you can ensure that it is wrapped up neatly and gets to your loved ones.

There are different kinds of creative writing, but all legal writing entails the imagination to consider and address a universe of possible circumstances that might exist at times in the future, as that contract or will is implemented, and to imagine the range of things that could go wrong. A good lawyer needs to be part essayist, part programmer, and part fortune-teller.

At your Thanksgiving table, there may be lively conversation about important issues like football, politics, and cornbread recipes. But it’s also a good time to take stock of the deeper issues in the background of your lives, like estate planning.

Planning for our passing or a loved one passing is the best thing that one can do for their loved ones. You can save them from further grief and trouble by putting things in order now. Let them focus on you when the time comes, not on banks and bills and bickering.

Part of the job of estate planning is thinking through the different ways the future might work out - who will survive whom, whether a beneficiary will be a minor or an adult at the time she receives the bequest. It’s important to take a range of possibilities into account.