Got a legal question?

Need a lawyer for a quick legal opinion? First of all, there probably isn't such a thing as a "quick" legal opinion. Just have a question without many "ifs, ands or buts", or so you think? Want the short skinny and not a law-school education? Did you get a traffic ticket and wonder if you need a lawyer? The person to ask is a lawyer! Not your neighbor, not your co-worker, not your sibling.

OK, so you can ask me. Ask away. I'm not a lawyer, but I'll give you a good answer.

You can call a lawyer-member of the Illinois State Bar Association (ISBA) and have a 30-minute telephone consultation for $25.00. Call (800) 922-8757. Since the going rate these days for many lawyers' time is $250-350/hour, this might be a nice bargain, if your question doesn't require research.

You may get what I'll call a "preliminary" opinion. And that might be good enough. But, if you have a real legal problem, then you want thorough advice from an attorney with skill in the specific area of the law pertaining to your question.

Consider these two questions:

Does a new Will revoke all prior Wills?

What are the possible answers? Yes. No. Maybe. It depends. I read a Will in Missouri in 1993 that carried the standard boilerplate language in the first paragraph which declared that the new Will did indeed revoke all prior Wills. The new Will was an excellent document, professionally drawn and thorough. So were all the other estate-planning documents.

But what the lawyer failed to do was actually read the prior Will. In that case the prior Will was one of those seldom-used Joint Wills (drawn up by a country lawyer) and in it each (of the man and wife making the Will) gave up the right to make a new Will after the first of them died. The purpose was to prevent the survivor from making a new Will and disinheriting the child(ren) of the first who died. And so all the fancy and expensive estate-planning disintegrated because the new Will was no good.

And another example - this one closer to home. Is my old Will still good?

Fifteen years after a good, careful and expensive estate plan was drawn up, the old folks died. "Everything is taken care of." What a wonderful phrase. They trusted their attorney. Well? The bank that was named as the Trustee of the trust had closed its trust department years before. If everything was taken care of, why didn't the bank or the attorney inform the old folks that a new Trustee needed to be named??? After several expensive trips to the courthouse, a new Trustee did get named. A considerable and unnecessary chunk got spend in legal fees and court costs to straighten out that mess.

Also, the new bank Trustee blew far too much money on lawyer's fees for the Estate, because he wouldn't make decisions that were within the scope of his authority without calling the attorney who had brought the Trust through the new bank's front doors. All those excessive expenses further reduced the inheritance to the children.

A smart, young (then) attorney I knew in Colorado defined Estate Planning as "Getting what you have to whom you want to get it, when you want them to get it, and in the manner in which you want them to receive it - and then, if you can also save some taxes, you do that, too."

Addressing these types of problems won't get done for $25.00, but a small fee could get you started.