Parents who wish to leave businesses or other substantial assets to their children have a special challenge as they undertake estate planning. This is particularly true if they would like to see their children jointly own or operate the business, vacation home or other asset. Where there are joint business and properties, generally a Partnership Charter is also utilized.

Our unique approach to the planning process, Holistic estate planning that employs collaboration-building strategies to make the estate planning process productive for all members of the family and avoid post-death conflicts or contests. It provides clients with an estate plan that satisfies their need to transfer both a financial and familial legacy.

Holistic estate planning involves parents and adult children together at the beginning of the process — working with BMC Associates and the family's estate planner. There are numerous advantages to this inclusive pre-planning:

• Parents still may alter their plans in response to what they learn from their children if they so choose.
• Involving everyone diminishes the probability of adversarial proceedings that will revolve around the testators' intent.
• Parents gain assurance that their children will feel fairly treated and will be able to work together harmoniously if the plans require cooperation (e.g., when they will co-own a family business or vacation property).
• Parents also gain assurances that the family will not descend into pettiness as they pass their money and possessions to the next generation and that the problems that have existed in family relationships will be resolved — or at least not exacerbated — during their final years.
• Parents and children gain assurances that there are adequate plans for the parents if they become dependent or incapacitated.
• Finally, many parents' fundamental concern is that their children will assume as their own the values the parents promoted for a lifetime. Holistic estate planning provides an opportunity to communicate and reinforce those values.

The central innovation of holistic estate planning is the full involvement of the adult beneficiaries in conversations with their parents in the early stages of the planning process, which allows the broadest range of concerns to be addressed. The conversations, which may take place during a family retreat, enable family members to explore the personal, familial, and financial aspects of the anticipated transition. While the final legal documents will not specifically address all these goals and concerns, the process leading up to the creation of the documents results in an estate plan that is better understood by all, more likely to be perceived as fair and acceptable, and less likely to produce hard feelings or legal challenges.

Family meetings facilitated by BMC, the sine qua non of holistic estate planning, complement and expand upon the traditional elements of estate preparation. A holistic approach helps families explore subjective and relationship issues that sometimes go undiscussed by holding meetings with individual family members, meetings with various subsets of the entire family (e.g., parents, siblings, spouses), and meetings with the entire group. The parents' attorney remains the expert on legal and financial matters and may participate in some of the meetings to explain various approaches and answer questions.

The parents and their attorney complete the planning process with the benefit of the insights gained from the interviews, meetings, and participation of BMC family systems specialists.

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