Hiring the Next Generation of Trust and Estate Attorneys

“Hiring the Next Generation of Trust and Estate Attorneys,” that is the subject of today’s ACTEC Trust and Estate Talk.

I’m Natalie Perry, an ACTEC Fellow from Chicago.

Hiring and training the next generation of trust and estate attorneys is critical to the future of the profession. We will explore best practices for hiring recent law school graduates, from identifying strong candidates to creating meaningful learning experiences that benefit both law associates and firms. The discussion offers practical guidance for estate planning professionals looking to build a sustainable talent pipeline.

ACTEC Fellow Christian Kelso of Dallas, Texas offers recommendations to law firms looking to hire new law graduates. Welcome, Christian.

Christian Kelso:  Hi Natalie, thanks so much for having me. It’s really an honor to be able to speak with you on the podcast today. I’m here to talk about hiring young attorneys coming out of law school. And the reason this has come up is because of a little bit of a crisis we seem to be facing in our profession today, and that is that our ranks are dwindling.

The Growing Shortage of Trust and Estate Attorneys

There are fewer planning types that are coming out of law school. There are fewer law students taking the estate planning courses, they’re not on the bar exam anymore, and law students don’t think that’s something they need to take. Oftentimes they don’t view planning as being a “sexy” area of law to get into – they think it’s not as lucrative. There are a number of reasons why they’re not taking the courses.

At the same time, we have a lot of older seasoned attorneys who are simply retiring because they’ve reached that stage in their life. We’ve got fewer coming in on the bottom, we’ve got more going out on the top, and all of this is happening in the middle of the largest transition of wealth in human history. So you can see how that’s going to turn into a problem.

Anecdotally, I’m sure many of the people that are listening to this podcast will identify with the notion that a lot of us are overworked and stressed out. We’ve got more clients than we know what to do with. We don’t feel like we can service them as well as we’d like to, simply because there aren’t enough of us to help them.

So, in light of this, over the last, let’s call it 5 or 10 years, my firm has taken a very proactive approach at helping to bring up some young lawyers. And that’s what I wanted to share about today.

Why Mentorship Is Essential in Trust and Estate Law

We believe that as planners, we have to take it upon ourselves to bring up the next crop of estate and trust lawyers and we’ve really taken that to heart. Now there’s a big challenge here. And the challenge is that in our world, there’s a very, very steep learning curve. It’s very difficult to take a first-year lawyer and actually make them profitable in a law firm. They don’t, as I mentioned earlier, they oftentimes don’t get sufficient training in law school. And even with the best training, even the ones that come out that have taken every class you think they should have, they still need several years to really wrap their heads around the many complexities that are involved with a T&E practice. And this applies in the law firm setting or the financial planning setting; this really does apply across the board.

Additionally, not only is our practice area very technical, but it’s highly nuanced as well. As I frequently like to tell the students that I teach, my law license says I’m both an attorney and a counselor. Not only do I have to know the rules, but I’ve got to be able to counsel my clients. And that oftentimes means thinking a lot about psychology of where they’re coming from and what is impacting them. And that’s not something you just pick up from a book, right? So there’s some experience that’s necessary there. What that adds up to is that the people that are entering our area need mentorship. And quite frankly, I think it’s incumbent upon us to assist them with that.

A Law Firm Internship Model for Training Future Estate Planners

So, in thinking about all these things at my firm, we came up with a solution and it’s pretty straightforward. We have a program by which we bring in law students as interns. Typically, we hire them as a 2L, that is just finishing their 2L year before they enter their 3L year. So, they’ve had some upper-class coursework that they’ve done. And we bring them in over a summer. We work with them. We try and train them as much as we can. We try and have them do substantive work as much as possible. And if we like them and if there’s a need and everything works out, we will oftentimes keep them for the following school year on a part-time basis, of course, at that point. And if things really work out well after they graduate, now they’ve had over a year of training with us, and hopefully we’ll be able to start off in a much better place than they might have been otherwise just coming straight out of law school.

Structuring Internships for Training and Productivity

The way we try and set this up, we try and have our interns spend about one-third of their time doing administrative work. At the beginning, they will do more administrative work, a little bit more than that, but we try and zero it in on about a third. At the same time, we try and have them do about a third substantive work. Again, at the beginning, they’ll do less of that because they need to learn a little bit more. So, they’ll do a little bit less, but then they’ll zero in on that one-third. And then the remaining third of the time that we have them in the office, we’re spending with them to assist them with direct learning. And that can be sitting in on meetings, we try and have an open-door policy where interns can sit in and just listen to what we’re talking about with our clients. It can be having them do research work, legal research-type stuff. Any of that work, if it’s billable, we will simply bill the intern as an administrative employee at the firm, just the same way we would as a personal assistant or a paralegal, depending on the type of the work.

And the idea there is that, at the end of the day, we want to have a net zero cost to having the intern around. That is to say, we want to bill them at a level where even though a lot of their time is not billable, we are earning enough income off of them to at least pay them the hourly wage that we have to pay them. Of course, it’s a lot better to do this training when you’re paying somebody at $20 or $30 an hour than a first year associate-type salary level.

There is, of course, a hidden cost of doing this, and that is the supervisor’s time. One way we address this in our firm is we have several supervisors for each of our interns. That way, no single partner or even associate – we’ll sometimes have associates work with interns – is spending too much time just sitting there, not billing, but just teaching somebody something and having a loss that way.

Practical Work Interns Can Perform in Estate Planning Firms

As far as performance objectives are concerned, we want our interns, by the time they get done with that summer program, we want them to be able to do some real substantive work for us that may involve preparing filings in a probate. It may involve drafting documents. I very frequently have interns drafting my ancillary documents by the time they’re done with their summer. That’s a goal just in my head that I always have. Sometimes they can even do some basic wills or maybe do some revisions of some wills. Maybe the client has asked for some changes in an email, and you can forward that and say, “hey, intern, here you go, can you please go implement these changes?” They can then have that opportunity to really work with that substantive document and see how it feels and understand how your forms work and things like that.  Other items that interns seem to be able to do well is prepare assignments of interest, deeds, and other documents.

What Law Firms Should Look for When Hiring Law Student Interns

The next question is, once you commit to doing a program like this, what are you looking for? When you’re interviewing a young law student, what is it that’s going to make them stand out and be a better intern? I have a short checklist. It’s really not that long.

• I will tell you, number one thing, this should be a no-brainer, it’s going to be personality fit. Is this person really going to fit with the culture of your firm or not? If they’re not going to fit, obviously, that’s not going to be a good thing to look for.
• The next biggest thing, though, is something that you don’t always see, and that is interest in the profession. That is to say, has the student taken courses which demonstrate that they really want to be an estate planner or a probate attorney or whatever it is that you need? Maybe your firm is focused on guardianship. Well, are the students taking courses that are really going to help them with that? Have they written any papers that might be appropriate to that sort of practice? What can you learn from those papers?
• Finally, are they willing to learn more about estate planning as a practice or whatever it is that your practice is?
• The next question we like to ask our prospective interns is, who are their people? Do they have some potentially valuable connections or maybe some skills that will help set them apart once they are in private practice? This can be very, very important. For example, my entire practice, I’ve drawn from the prep school I was fortunate enough to attend as a high school student. I’ve got a lot of clients from that. If we can find something similar for one of our interns, we’d love to see that because we know that’s going to help provide a client base for them when they get out.
• Where do they want to live and why? We don’t want to see a student that’s applying from another city that has absolutely no interest in living in Dallas, where I am currently, but we get those applications a lot and those are the ones we tend to weed out. Sometimes the connection to the city is hard to find. Sometimes it’s there, it’s hard to find, so you have to ask. Sometimes you just have to dig in a little bit.
• Does the candidate have any history with estate planning? Has their family been through a traumatic probate? Do they have family trusts that they can glean some insight from? We always want to hear about those sorts of stories.
• Of course, what is their previous work history? Have they worked for a probate court or something similar? Have they worked for another planning firm or something like that?

How Law Firms Can Retain Young Estate Planning Attorneys

There’s one other question that we get very frequently and that when we talk about this particular issue, we get this question very frequently and that is: “How do you keep these people? What prevents some other law firm from coming in and sniping them once you’ve done such a great job training them up?” To a large extent, there’s nothing you can do about that. We consider it a service to our community if another firm comes in and recognizes that we do a good job training people and they want to hire that person – good for them. I’m not going to be upset about that. But, if that is a concern for you, there are a couple of things you can do. You can help them pay down their law school debt or maybe you can send them to get an LL.M. and offer to pay down that debt over time if they stick around. Just some options you can think about.

Why Training the Next Generation of Estate Planning Attorneys Matters

I hope this has been helpful for you. In conclusion, I just want to repeat that raising up young lawyers really is a service. I believe that if you just give it a try, you’ll find that there’s a lot of pleasure and a lot of pride from helping these young lawyers raise up and become good at their craft. Even if you don’t hire the intern full time, they’ll usually become a networking contact or a friend, and that’s always nice to increase those circles. Of course, you have to be willing to put in the time to help them learn. But if you do so, it can be really, really rewarding. And I really hope that more lawyers will start to do that moving forward. Thanks for having me.

Natalie Perry:  Thank you, Christian, for the excellent tips on hiring recent law school graduates.

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