Your estate is everything you own. All of your real estate, personal property and property rights, including assets with loans against them. Estate planning is deciding who gets it, rather than letting the state decide.
If you die without a will, Illinois intestacy law distributes your property according to a formula that knows nothing about your family. It does not know which child helped, which relative you have not spoken to in twenty years, or that the house was always meant for a particular person. It also routes the whole thing through probate, in public, at length.
01
A will names who receives what, appoints the executor who carries it out, and names a guardian for minor children, which is often the single most important line in the document. It has to be executed the way Illinois requires or it does not work, and homemade wills fail on execution more often than on content.
02
A trust holds property during your life and passes it afterward without probate. For Illinois homeowners the practical version is usually a land trust or a living trust holding the residence, created by a deed in trust. It keeps the transfer private, keeps the property out of the probate queue, and makes the eventual sale materially simpler for whoever is handling it.
03
Powers of attorney for property and for health care do their work before any of the rest of it matters. They decide who signs and who speaks if you cannot, and without them the answer involves a courtroom and a guardianship petition at exactly the wrong moment.
04
For most families the estate is the house. How that house is titled and whether it sits in a trust decides whether it passes cleanly or becomes the thing the family argues about. Land Law's estate work sits alongside its real estate practice for that reason: the planning and the property are the same conversation.
The same order every time, because most of the expensive mistakes in this area come from doing step four before step two.
What you own, how each piece is titled, and what already has a beneficiary named on it.
Who receives what, who executes it, and who raises your children if it comes to that.
Drafted, then signed and witnessed the way Illinois requires. Execution is not a formality.
A trust only holds what has actually been deeded into it, so the deeds get done too.
A will is enough for many people. A trust earns its cost when you own real estate, want to avoid probate, or want the transfer to stay private.
Intestacy law distributes your property by formula and probate supervises it. Both outcomes are public and neither is tailored to your family.
You can, and Illinois has strict execution requirements that homemade wills regularly fail. A will that is invalid is the same as no will.
It is the deed that actually moves your property into a trust. Creating the trust without deeding the property into it is the most common way trusts fail to do their job.
After a marriage, a divorce, a birth, a death, a move to another state, or buying or selling property.
In Illinois, an attorney reads the contract before you are bound by it. That is the whole job, and it is worth more than most people expect for what it costs.
Starting a business is mostly a series of small decisions that are cheap now and expensive to unwind later. Which entity, who owns what, and what the agreement says when the partnership stops being fun.
Illinois is a judicial foreclosure state, which means the lender has to sue you and you have the right to answer. Doing nothing is the option that costs the most.
The rest of the practice is on the practice areas index. If you would rather judge the firm by result than by description, read what clients have said or look at who would actually be handling it.
The first consultation is free. Bring the contract, the notice, or the question, and you will get a straight read on whether you need a lawyer at all.
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