Caryn B. Keppler - New York, NY

Our experience with this attorney was completely unsatisfactory. We went to her for estate planning and the creation of wills/trusts. She failed to disclose in advance relevant information for is to make informed decisions. She presented us with a draft without specifying costs, consequences, or alternatives to her proposal. . Undisclosed choices were available to us that no one but a professional would know existed. Specifically, to maximize estate tax avoidance, we were told there needed by law to be a co-trustee alongside the surviving spouse.. The constraints on the surviving spouse were not disclosed. The existence of provisions to maximize the discretion of the surviving spouse were not disclosed, either in our introductory meeting or in a subsequent hour long two-lawyer phone meeting. After repeated questioning on my part, we learned first from her associate (!) and then from Caryn herself that two significant provisions could be added that mitigated the constraints of a co-executor. For our beneficiaries, she recommended that the bequests be put in a beneficiary trust. The benefit of this we were told would be to shield them from creditors. We were not told the constraints on access to funds or control over them that the beneficiaries would be under. We were not told the duties and obligations of the trustee (management of assets, filing of tax returns on ongoing basis), or the costs of setting up these trusts. We were not told that a simple alternative was to leave the money outright to our designated beneficiaries. She did not advise us in advance of these alternatives, but pre-emptively presented us with a draft to review. She was in a position to know that we had seventeen beneficiaries. All of the relevant information about the co-trustee ship for the surviving spouse and the consequences of beneficiary trusts was not volunteered by her or her associate, but laboriously ferreted out by my repeated questioning. All of this is documented by the email record. At no time did Caryn challenge my assertions in this regard. The time involved in finding out what she should have told us in advance resulted in a charge of 50% over the original estimate. I refused to pay and after she offered a paltry settlement, I elevated the issue to the head of practice for the firm. Ultimately he settled the charge at the original estimate. All of this can be documented. I strongly advise not to use this attorney. Had modifications to her draft not been made after my repeated questioning, we would have been left with a totally unsatisfactory result.