How Many Pages Are In A Living Trust?

After meeting with some wonderful clients a few weeks ago, I was asked a slew of questions to see if they wanted to hire our firm to draw up their estate plan. They had a list of questions to ask an estate planning attorney. So they asked me some questions. One that I remember is how many pages is your Living Trust?

It was an interesting question. My answer was it depends on the kind of trust you have and whether we are including trust language for minors, separate share trusts or other special distribution provisions.

A trust for a single person was 29 pages for one I did a few weeks ago. A trust for a married couple with tax saving provisions -- called a three-way marital in attorney lingo -- that I did a month ago was 43 pages.

I wasn't insulted by the question, but I wasn't sure what it measured. So I added to my answer that our firm and our estate planning attorneys are not a trust mill. We don't turn them out by the day. Typically I prepare one estate plan a week with a three to four week turnaround from start to finish if this is what the client wants or we can take even more time if they need to gather more information and think about things after our initial meeting. In between drafting trusts, I handle a variety of probate and other litigation tasks on a day to day basis. We also handle other issues as well such as trust administration and conservatorships.