Bruce Mciver

Mr. McIver recently completed our estate plan. He drafted our revocable trust, pour over wills, powers of attorney for finances, and advance health care directives. He also prepared the trust transfer deeds to our four properties located in two states and four different jurisdictions, which requi...red considerable skill and experience. He also advised us on the merits of transferring our limited liability corporation into our revocable trust. He completed these elements seamlessly and professionally. He answered all of our questions clearly and patiently. We give Mr. McIver an overall rating of “excellent” and recommended him without hesitation for his estate planning skills and expertise.

Mr. McIver made several critical mistakes in drawing up our trust that made key past of it almost uninterpretable. Specifically, he renamed a previous trust (something to which we agreed on his advice) but then used the previous name in the document to refer to the purportedly new trust. So, the new ...trust document shows one title for it, whereas the document itself defines a different title. Our pour-over wills (which he drew up) now refer to a trust that doesn't really exist, as do some of our financial accounts that we moved into the non-existent trust. Color us frustrated! On some straightforward, but technical issues about allocations of our estate upon our deaths, Mr. McIver failed to explain some likely complications that would arise using the method we proposed and which would be completely counter to what we would have wanted. A slightly different approach to the distribution of gifts to organizations would have achieved the same result, but have avoided the delays that would have been inevitable using the wording that he approved. He pointed out that our approach was a bit unusual, but didn't provide any reason why this approach would be very likely to cause complications and delays - and was, therefore, a bad idea. Mr. McIver is a nice guy, but he didn't pay enough attention to the details. Fortunately, we are re-doing our trust now (just two years later) with a different lawyer and have turned up these multiple issues which we can now correct.