Your estate plan, handled from wherever you already are — anywhere in California.

Check me. The State Bar of California publishes every licensee — I am Bar No. 233854, admitted 2004, and you can open my record directly to see my standing and any disciplinary history. Do this for every lawyer you consider hiring, remote or not. It takes thirty seconds and it is the single best consumer protection available to you.

Everything except the signature, yes. Consultation, drafting, revisions, the review call, the deed, the recording — all remote.

The signing has to be in person, because California has not implemented remote online notarization yet and does not permit remote witnessing of a will. You book a notary near you and bring two witnesses; I send a written packet telling you exactly how to run that appointment. About forty minutes, once, on your own schedule. Full walkthrough here.

If you have seen a service advertising a “100% online” California estate plan, this is the law it runs into:

All of it. I am licensed by the State Bar of California and take clients in all 58 counties — the Bay Area, Los Angeles, San Diego, Sacramento, the Central Valley, the North Coast, the Sierra and the desert. Because we work by phone and video, a client in Alturas gets the same attention as one in Montecito.

I am not licensed anywhere else. If you live out of state and own no California property, I am the wrong lawyer, and I will tell you that on the first call rather than after you have paid me.

A will does not avoid probate — it is the instrument that governs probate. If what you own exceeds California's small‑estate limits, a will sends your family to court; a properly funded living trust does not.

The limits, for deaths on or after April 1, 2025: $208,850 in personal property can transfer by affidavit under Probate Code § 13100, and real property other than a primary residence can pass by simplified petition at the same figure. A decedent's primary residence is handled separately, up to $750,000, under § 13151. These figures adjust for inflation every three years and are next due to change on April 1, 2028 — check them against the current numbers if you are reading this later.

In most of California, a single home clears all of them.

It is set by statute, not negotiated. The attorney and the personal representative are each paid 4% of the first $100,000, 3% of the next $100,000, 2% of the next $800,000, 1% of the next $9,000,000, and 0.5% of the next $15,000,000.

On a $1,000,000 estate that is $23,000 each — $46,000 before filing fees, the referee's appraisal, publication or bond. Because it runs on gross appraised value, a mortgage does not reduce it. The calculator above will run your numbers.

Rarely less than nine months, and commonly twelve to eighteen. Part of that is structural: creditors get a claim window running four months from the day letters are issued, and the estate cannot close before it expires. Add court calendars, the appraisal, and any disagreement among beneficiaries, and multi‑year probates are not unusual. A trust administration typically runs a few months, without a courtroom.

Almost certainly not. The federal estate tax exemption is $15,000,000 per person in 2026, and it was made permanent rather than sunsetting as previously scheduled — a married couple can shelter $30,000,000 with proper portability planning. California imposes no state estate tax and no inheritance tax. For the overwhelming majority of families, the reason to plan is probate avoidance, incapacity, and control — not tax.

Drafts go to a secure client portal, not as email attachments — email is the weakest link in most law practices and the one clients notice least. Signed originals stay with you; I keep a conformed electronic copy. Nothing about working remotely changes the duty of confidentiality under Rule 1.6, and nothing about it makes me more casual with your file.

You pay it directly, and it is small. California caps notary fees per signature by statute — $15 as this is written, so confirm the current figure when you book. Many banks and credit unions notarize free for their own customers. A mobile notary who drives to you adds a travel fee, which is not capped — agree on that number when you book, and expect somewhere in the range of $50–$150 depending on distance.

I keep this outside the flat fee deliberately. Bundling it would mean charging every client a statewide average instead of letting the client in Fresno pay Fresno prices.

Two people, in the room at the same time, who understand they are witnessing a will. Neighbors, coworkers, friends, the notary's assistant — all fine.

Not a beneficiary. Under Probate Code § 6112, a gift to a person who signed as a witness creates a rebuttable presumption that they obtained it through duress, menace, fraud or undue influence, unless two other disinterested witnesses also signed. So: not your spouse, not your children, not anyone who appears in the documents. This is the single most common self‑inflicted wound in do‑it‑yourself estate plans, and it is entirely avoidable.

More than most people expect, on a clock. Within 60 days of the death you must serve notice under Probate Code § 16061.7 on every beneficiary and every heir — and that notice starts a 120‑day window in which someone can contest the trust. Until the notice is served correctly, the contest period does not start — and a trustee who fails to serve it can be personally liable for the harm (§ 16061.9).

After that: marshalling assets, retitling property out of the trust, coordinating the final income tax returns, an accounting, and distribution. You are personally liable to the beneficiaries for getting it wrong, which is why doing it alone is rarely the bargain it looks like.

None of it requires a courtroom, so I handle it entirely remotely, from $6,500 flat, quoted once I know what the estate holds.

You mostly can't, by reading it — the document is usually fine. What fails is the funding, and that isn't visible in the trust itself. It's visible at the county recorder.

That is what the $500 trust review is. I read what you have, pull the title on your real property to see whose name is actually on it, check that your successor trustees and beneficiaries still reflect your life, and give you written findings in plain English. If it's sound, I tell you so and you've spent $500 for the peace of mind. If it isn't, you get a firm quote to fix it and no obligation to accept.

There is a window on this, and it closes. While you are alive and competent, a house left out of the trust is fixed with one deed. After you die it is fixed with a petition to the probate court under Probate Code § 850 — months, a filing, a hearing, and a legal bill that dwarfs what the review and the deed would have cost. The documents do not get easier to repair with time; they just get repaired by a judge instead of by you.

So this is not a service you book a meeting about. Send me the trust and the address of the property, and I will do the work.

Worth doing if your trust predates 2018, if you have bought or refinanced property since it was signed, or if it came from an online service for a few hundred dollars.

Because an unfunded trust is an empty box. A trust only controls what has actually been retitled into it — if the house is still in your own name when you die, it goes to probate regardless of what the trust says. This is the most common failure I see in plans drafted elsewhere, which is why the deed and the recording are inside the flat fee rather than an add‑on.

One deed is included, and so is the county recorder's fee for recording it. Each additional California property is $450 — a separate deed, a separate change-of-ownership form and a separate recording, with the recorder's charges inside that figure. Income property, property on more than one parcel, property you own with someone outside your household, or anything with unusual vesting I quote after I have seen title, because those are not the same job.

What “included” means precisely: the county recorder's charges for recording the document. It does not mean transfer tax. Moving your home into your own revocable trust is exempt from documentary transfer tax under Revenue & Taxation Code § 11930, and I claim that exemption on the face of the deed, so in the ordinary case there is no tax to pay. A few California cities levy their own transfer tax that does not track the state exemptions — Los Angeles above roughly $5.4 million is the one that catches people. If your property is in one of those cities and anywhere near a threshold, you will hear it from me before anything is recorded, not afterwards.

Property outside California needs a lawyer licensed in that state to prepare the deed — I will tell you so on the first call rather than after you have paid me.

Retitling your residence into your own revocable trust does not trigger reassessment under Proposition 13 and does not accelerate your mortgage.

Send the form below, or pick a time on my calendar. Thirty minutes by video or phone, about what you own, who you want it to go to, and what is likely to go wrong. You leave with a recommendation and a firm price. No charge, no obligation.

What it is not is a free legal opinion on documents you already have. I can tell you in thirty minutes whether you need a plan and what it would cost. I cannot tell you in thirty minutes whether the plan you already have works — that takes reading the documents properly and pulling county title to see whose name is actually on your house. That is the $500 Trust Review, and if it turns out your trust is sound I will tell you so and that is the end of it.