Try to find this number on a law firm website. You usually cannot. The page says “contact us for a consultation,” which is a polite way of saying the number depends on things nobody wants to discuss before you are in the room.
That is a bad experience, and it is worth explaining plainly instead.
The short version
Every plan here is quoted as a flat fee, agreed before any work begins. Not an estimate, not a range that moves later. You are told the number, you decide, and then work starts. If the scope genuinely changes because something unexpected turns up, that is a conversation before it happens, not a line on an invoice afterward.
The specific figure depends on what your situation actually calls for, which is what the free fifteen minute call is for. That conversation frequently ends with a smaller plan than the caller expected, because a good many people arrive convinced they need more than they do.
Why hourly billing fits this work badly
Hourly billing makes sense when nobody can predict how long something will take. Litigation is like that. Estate planning is not.
Estate planning is largely knowable work. An experienced attorney can tell from a short conversation whether your situation is a straightforward family plan or one with a business interest, property in several counties, or a blended family. Once that is known, the work is predictable.
Hourly billing on predictable work mostly transfers risk to you, and it has a second effect that is worse: it makes you reluctant to call. When the meter runs, clients stop asking questions. Questions are the entire value of hiring a lawyer instead of downloading a form.
What actually moves the number
A plan costs more when it involves more decisions, not when you have more money. The things that genuinely add work:
- A business interest. An LLC or a practice means your operating agreement and your estate plan have to be read together and made to agree. They frequently contradict each other, and the operating agreement often wins.
- Real estate in more than one county, or in more than one state. Each parcel needs its own correctly prepared deed, drawn for the right register of deeds.
- A blended family. Providing for a current spouse and for children from an earlier marriage is a design question, and it is the one most often handled badly.
- A beneficiary who needs protection. A child who is young, or receiving disability benefits an inheritance would disqualify them from, or in a difficult marriage, or struggling with debt or addiction. This is where a trust earns its fee outright.
- Staged distributions. Deciding that money is released over years rather than at once is more drafting than a single transfer.
And what does not move it much: the size of your estate. A modest estate with young children is usually more involved than a large one going outright to a competent spouse.
What should be included
When you compare quotes, compare what is in them. A trust-based plan quoted here includes the deed work required to move your home into the trust.
That matters more than it sounds. Preparing the deed is the step that makes a trust function, and it is the step most often left out of a low quote and discovered later as an extra. A trust that never had a deed prepared for it does not control your house. If it is not in the quote, ask why.
The cheap options, honestly
Online form services genuinely cost less up front, and for a simple situation a will produced that way may be valid.
The failure is not usually the document. It is that nobody funds the trust, nobody prepares the deed, nobody reviews the beneficiary designations that override the will anyway, and nobody asks the question that would have changed the design. The family finds out years later, during probate, that the plan did not do what they thought it did.
Fixing an estate after the fact costs substantially more than doing it correctly the first time, and by then the person who could have explained what they wanted is gone.
Paying for a plan you will actually update
An estate plan is not permanent. It should be looked at every five years or so, and after anything significant: a marriage, a divorce, a birth, a death, a business sold, a move to another state.
Ask what a review costs before you hire anyone. A firm that treats updates as a fresh engagement every time is a firm whose plans quietly go stale.
Remy Law PLLC is based in Ann Arbor and serves families and small business owners across Washtenaw County and western Wayne County. George Remy has practiced law in Michigan for more than eighteen years and handles every plan personally. The first conversation is a free fifteen minute call, and the number is settled before any work starts.