Legal Question in Tax Law in California

Re: fee agreement

There are no fees "in general". It depends on what your current trust says, what you really need, and how much work is required to make the change.

Re: fee agreement

I doubt you can have it done correctly for less than $1000. It just takes dedicated legal time to be certain you are in compliance. Ultimately, you can find later that it requires a complete redraft because of enforceability issues and unnecessary conflicts.

Re: fee agreement

Unless you go back to the attorney who prepared the trust in the first place, it is usually cheaper and easier to draft an entirely new trust, rather than modify an existing trust. When an attorney modifies a document that they're accustomed to working with, they can do so relatively quickly and confidently.

When you ask an attorney to modify a document that they're not familiar with (even if they are familiar with the general area of law), the first thing they need to do is to spend time studying the document to make sure they understand what it is doing, and making sure that all of the language and strategies used are appropriate given the way that the law is today. Essentially, you're asking them (and their malpractice insurance) to guarantee the work that someone else did - because if there's a problem later on, they're likely to be sued for failing to prevent the problem, even if it's in a part of the document they didn't prepare or modify.

So - what you're asking for sounds simple, but from an attorney's perspective turns out to be a lot of work, especially given the fact that clients are unlikely to be excited about paying a lot of money for the time spent reading and analyzing the document. My impression is most attorneys don't do this sort of thing, or do so at rates that are comparable to starting from scratch. I strongly discourage clients from adopting this approach and generally tell people that if they want to work with me we need to work with my documents from the beginning.