Financial Reasons to Focus on Succession Planning
Management and financial entanglements can be great if you fail to prepare for your death. Your family might endure challenges with an unsatisfactory result if you do not spend time planning for your succession.
A woman attorney in a Northeast state wanted me to help her father sell his law practice in another nearby state; he had been diagnosed with terminal cancer. The best solution in this instance was for the daughter to take over her aging father's practice and either grow it or sell it at her pace, without the pressure of a "fire sale." She didn't want to move back to the father's state, though, since she had her own practice as well as other family needs. Within six months, without having taken any action to sell his practice or otherwise provide for his clients, the father died. In this case, the daughter essentially had to "give away to strangers" the substantial value that the goodwill of her father's practice represented. This result could have been prevented with planning. It was unfair to all concerned.
In another matter, where I was called in to provide expert testimony, a lawyer was diagnosed with a terminal disease two months before dying. He quickly put together a plan to sell and, on his deathbed, believed that he had sold the practice to an associate and thereby taken care of his widow and his clients. But, failing to have the appropriate professional expertise representing him before he died, the result was that a contract of sale hadn't been executed and the presumptive buyer walked away from the transaction. In what I believe to be a rare lawsuit concerning a transaction of sale of a law practice, the estate and the presumptive buyer have told very different versions of the story. Litigation is never inexpensive, either in terms of dollars or emotions. The lesson: Save your heirs the turmoil resulting from such poor planning.
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