What Is Estate Planning? Jason Bottlinger Explains

By Jason Bottlinger on August 15, 2019

In this video interview, Jason Bottlinger talks about how his firm handles estate planning for Omaha families and what makes for a successful transition. Do you need a will? A trust? A limited liability company? Our legal team can look at your situation and use the right vehicle to match your objective.

TRANSCRIPT

Jason Bottlinger: Our estate-planning services center around evaluating what our clients’ goals are for the next generation and helping them achieve a succession strategy that is successful, and that gives life to their wishes after they’re gone.

Particularly when helping families who have family businesses or farms, we find that the more clarity there is on how the asset transition and the business transition should occur, the more clarity there is to that, the more there is success. When there isn’t clarity, we see so many traumatic situations evolve where there is fighting and strife inside the family, and the family relationships are absolutely destroyed. That can be avoided if the proper planning occurs in advance.

We can help our clients achieve that proper planning through a variety of different vehicles. We use trusts and we use limited liability companies and partnerships, but not without considering what is the best and most efficient means of accomplishing the client’s objective.

Our perspective on our estate planning is informed by our history as a trial law firm. Most of my earlier experiences as a lawyer dealt with helping people who were past the point of planning, and who were the next generation, and who were fighting with each other. They were litigation cases where either proper planning didn’t happen or no planning happened, and as a result, the next generation was fighting one another; and brother and sisters were tearing each other apart, not talking anymore. And the most important asset a family can have, “family,” was destroyed.

So, from that background, we began an estate-planning practice that began, primarily helping farmers and ranchers in the rural Midwest with succession strategies that both transitioned the assets and the business. From there, we now help many urban families as well, from small families who are just having their first child to established families and older clients as well.

But in all situations, [we are] listening to the client, figuring out what the client’s fear are, what the client’s hopes are, what the client’s goals are, and crafting a solution to accomplish those goals with the most streamlined, efficient, commonsense, understandable approach that we possibly can.

 Would you like to speak to Jason about planning your estate in Omaha? Please call (402) 505-8234 for a free initial consultation.