Remote Estate Planning Services

Dear Friends,

We hope that this newsletter finds you and your loved ones safe and well during these challenging times. As you might imagine, the current COVID-19 crisis has led many of us to consider creating or revising our estate plans. We stress forward thinking on this issue because, in a Covid-19 context, there is no luxury of time. We have received a number of inquiries about whether it is possible to prepare and execute new or revised estate plans under the current stay-at-home advisory and recommended social distancing measures. The answer is yes!

Our entire team remains at the forefront of addressing this important issue. As some of you already know, our office took early steps to ensure that we can continue to assist all of our current and future clients with their estate planning needs using both traditional as well as secure, remote technology in order to facilitate the estate planning process for our clients from the safety of their homes.

Going forward, we will gather, review, and transmit information concerning your estate-planning intentions by phone, by email, and by remote video conference meetings. We already submit draft documents to our clients by email and discuss questions or concerns by phone and email. In addition, we are prepared to assist you in facilitating the safest, most efficient means to execute your final estate planning documents remotely. We will send you copies of your executed documents thereafter and when this crisis resolves, we will send you a binder with paper copies of your documents.

We are confident that our Legislature and Governor correctly understand that urgent legislative action is necessary to clarify our existing notary laws given the nature of our present emergency. We have been in close contact with our state senators and representatives on this important issue and we are optimistic that the Massachusetts legislature will soon pass and that Governor Baker will sign an emergency remote notarization law. This anticipated new law will clarify the current notary laws to expressly allow for real-time, remote notarization of estate planning and other legal documents using real-time, recorded videoconferencing technology.

We are pleased to report that we already have the technology and procedures in place to effectuate the notarization process contemplated under the proposed legislation. We anticipated that the legislation would have to happen and the bill that the Senate passed was almost exactly the process we had already fashioned and completed for several of our clients.

We understand your estate planning concerns in this situation and are prepared to address them with you expeditiously.

If you have any questions or concerns, please call.