Once again, another celebrity has died with an out-of-date Will. Heath Ledger’s Will has been made public (as all Wills are public documents after death) and it turns out that the Will, made three years prior to his daughter’s birth, leaves everything to his parents and sister.

We saw the same thing recently when Anna Nicole Smith died and her Will left everything to her deceased son, made no mention of her baby daughter Danielynn or her long-time life/love partner Howard K. Stern, who stuck by her through all of her ups and downs for years prior to her death.Heath’s parents have publicly assured that Matilda will be well taken care of and she’s likely to be deemed a pretermitted heir or omitted heir anyway, which would mean she’ll end up inheriting Heath’s estate and a Los Angeles Court has established Dannielynn as Anna Nicole’s sole heir, so in the end the kids will be taken care of but those results only tell part of the story.

First off, neither Michelle Williams, Matilda’s mother, nor Howard K. Stern, Anna Nicole’s long-time partner, were provided for and the law doesn’t make any provision for unmarried partners.   Would Heath and Anna really have wanted Michelle and Howard to get nothing?

Second, while Matilda and Dannielynn will ultimately inherit from their parents due to the pretermitted heir laws noted above, Heath and Anna lost out on the chance to decide the terms under which their babies would receive the money they left behind and to name who would take care of that money until the received it.

These incidents are indicative of a greater national problem that exists - the current model for providing legal services in the United States is desperately broken!

Even wealthy celebrities are victim of the current mindset that estate planning is about form documents that can be prepared once and never looked at again. As these cases highlight, that’s incorrect.

The truth of the matter is that estate planning really has very little to do with form documents. Think about this: standard estate planning form documents can be purchased on the internet for a couple hundred bucks, completed with the help of a do it yourself kit for only $13.50 or you could spend $2,750 to have the forms prepared for you by an Arizona lawyer who calls himself the Estate Planning Doctor.

Here’s the amazing thing . . . whether you spend $13.50 or $2,750.00, at the end of the day all you end up with is documents that in many cases won’t work when your family needs them.

What you want when it comes to estate planning is not a set of form documents. What you want is a relationship with a personal lawyer who is going to guide you to make the best decision throughout your lifetime, be there for your family when you can’t be, and make sure your estate plan stays up to date so when you have a new baby, they know about it, the baby gets added to your plan and your plan works when your family needs it.

© 2008 Alexis Martin Neely