Estate planning under a solo advisor’s own name

Sooner or later a household will ask a solo advisor who prepares its documents. For a one-person practice, the answer does most of the positioning work. It has to be accurate and keep the advisor in the coordinator’s role rather than the attorney’s. It should also leave the household sure that the service belongs to the practice it already trusts, though software produces the documents.

The plain answer goes like this. The household answers a questionnaire. The documents are generated from templates drafted from the state’s statutes. Where it is offered, a licensed attorney’s review of an individual document is available as a separate service. The advisor runs the meetings: the signing, the funding of the trust, and the reviews that follow. None of that requires hiding the platform, and in a solo practice there is rarely a reason to try.

Our article on what white-label actually means follows a test household through every surface a client touches. This article covers how a one-person practice describes the service and arranges it so that the household’s questions, and its records, stay with the practice.

Describe the service the way it runs

The simplest positioning offers estate planning under the practice’s own name, to the households it already serves. The description that follows should match how the work is done, and most of the risk is in the verbs. “We prepare your will,” “our legal team,” and “we’ll draft the trust that fits your situation” each tell the household the advisor is doing an attorney’s work. Whether something is the practice of law turns on what is done, not on what the service is called. Our guide to where the UPL line sits for advisors covers that line in detail.

Something like this answers the household’s first question in full:

The fee belongs in the same register. The practice charges for what it does: the conversation, the coordination, the meetings and the follow-up. Our article on pricing an estate-planning service sets out how to structure that so the invoice describes the advisor’s work and never a legal document.

Where the platform’s name belongs

Households already deal with a provider behind their advisor. An SEC-registered adviser with custody of client funds or securities must have “a reasonable basis, after due inquiry, for believing that the qualified custodian sends an account statement, at least quarterly,” to each client whose assets it holds (SEC Rule 206(4)-2(a)(3)-2)). The custodian’s name on that statement does not make the custodian the advisor; clients still bring their questions about it to the person who explains it at the review.

Estate planning can work the same way. A platform’s name properly sits in the terms of service and the privacy policy, and often in the portal’s web address and the address its emails are sent from. Those are the places a household goes to learn who handles its data and on what terms, and a disclosure there is honest. The surfaces the household uses to do the work should carry the practice’s name, or the household’s own: the invitation, the sign-in page, the emails about the next step, the plan documents, and the letters to the institutions holding its accounts.

Make sure the household’s questions reach the practice

A household working through a questionnaire will get stuck somewhere: whom to name as trustee, whether a joint account belongs on the asset list, what a funding letter is for. Where that question goes depends on settings that are easy to leave at the provider’s defaults. Before the first household is invited, check these:

• The reply-to address on household emails. If it points to the provider’s support desk, a household that hits reply is writing to people it has never met.
• The support contact shown in the portal and on the sign-in page.
• The name and email address at the foot of each message, which should be the advisor’s.

Questions about the documents themselves are where the coordinator’s role matters most. Whom to name as trustee is the household’s decision, and what a clause means for this particular family is a question for an attorney. The advisor can explain what a trustee does, what the questionnaire is asking, and how to request attorney review. Our article on the successor trustee who was never asked covers the conversation that follows the choice.

The household should also know who runs each meeting. The advisor leads the signing, with witnesses and a notary present where the state requires them, and then the funding meeting, where the household’s accounts are moved into the trust. The household enters its own answers and its own asset list. Around intake, the advisor’s job is the list of what to gather, the schedule, and the follow-up.

Funding is the step most likely to stall without that follow-up. Letters to banks and brokerages go out over the household’s signature as trustee, and someone has to confirm that each one was mailed and that each institution made the change. In a one-person practice, that follow-up falls to the advisor, and our article on why trust funding gets left unfinished explains what happens when it is left to no one.

If the advisor becomes unavailable

Every practice has to say what happens to the household’s plan if its advisor dies, becomes disabled, or stops practicing, and a one-person practice should be able to say it in writing. The question matters more in estate planning, because the household is arranging its affairs for decades and will reasonably want to know its file does not depend on one person’s memory.

For a state-registered investment adviser, this is also a regulatory question. The NASAA Model Rule on Business Continuity and Succession Planning, adopted April 13, 2015, says every investment adviser “shall establish, implement, and maintain written procedures relating to a Business Continuity and Succession Plan” (NASAA). The plan must provide for, among other things, “the protection, backup, and recovery of books and records” and the “assignment of duties to qualified responsible persons in the event of the death or unavailability of key personnel.” A model rule binds no one until a state adopts it, and states adopt it in their own form, so the governing text is the state’s version.

NASAA’s guidance, published with the rule, speaks directly to one-person firms. An adviser with a single adviser representative “may need to have a designated individual who is familiar with its business operations” to wind the business down or transfer its accounts. If that person would see confidential client information, the guidance says the adviser must have “proper pre-arranged client authorization” to share it. It also warns that an adviser representative’s knowledge of a client’s investment objectives, if it “is not in writing,” would be lost.

The same logic applies to much of an estate-planning file. Which accounts were retitled, which letters are still waiting on an institution, whom the household named and whether those people know, when the next review is due: if those facts live only in the advisor’s memory and inbox, they leave with the advisor, while a record the household can reach keeps them. The signed documents were always the household’s, so what a continuity plan has to protect is the working file around them. Our article on what happens to the file when an advisor leaves a firm covers the same question for multi-advisor practices.

An insurance-licensed planner or a CPA offering the service may not be covered by the NASAA rule at all. The household will ask the question anyway, and the practice can answer it in writing, with a named designee and the records in a place the household can reach.

How Bancroft handles it

Every Bancroft plan puts the practice’s logo, colors, fonts and name on the client portal, which runs at the practice’s own subdomain of usebancroft.com, and on its sign-in page. Household emails go out under the practice’s name with the advisor’s name and email at the foot, and the practice sets the support address that replies and support links go to. The plan summary and the funding guide carry the practice’s name. Funding letters are written for the household to sign as trustee and carry no vendor name. The Firm plan adds the practice’s own custom domain.

The terms of service and privacy policy name Bancroft as the platform provider. If the practice cancels or its subscription lapses, the household keeps its own sign-in, its documents, its funding letters and its Digital Safe, which is included on every plan. No plan charges per-document generation fees, and the Advisor plan is $299 a month. The help center shows what your clients will see, and the solo advisors page shows how the plan fits a one-person practice.