Estate Planning Attorney

Not an attorney, but we had a great experience doing this recently with Guideway (offices in Oakland, Tri-Valley, and Walnut Creek--we used the Oakland office). We had a relatively straightforward situation (pretty typical shared assets, house that we wanted to move into a trust, and needed to choose guardians and write wills and advance healthcare directives). Their process was very clear and easy to complete, they answered all of our questions and notarized/filed all the paperwork, and the whole thing was pretty affordable--far less than it would have been to do through an attorney. We'd been dragging our feet on doing this for some time and it was nice to finally knock it off the list. I believe they only handle uncontested matters, though, so probably not the right fit if you need someone to help you negotiate disputes with a partner or co-parent around these decisions.

We LOVE Summerall Law [https://www.summeralllaw.com/]

Excellent followup, transparent pricing on website, and timely and thorough work. I think you get a discount if you say I rerfered you.

Patricia De Fonte is a phenomenal estate planning attorney. We worked with her to set up our trust and guardian nomination. She really gets to know you and understand your goals. For example, our guardian nomination wasn’t just names and contact information. It included our wishes for our child so that the guardian would know what we want. I’m an attorney myself and was really impressed with Patricia. https://defontelaw.com

We use Michael Blacksburg and he's fantastic! https://blacksburg-law.com/ 

We recently used Albert Wu at Summerall Law (on Piedmont Avenue in Oakland) both to set up all of our own estate plans and to update my mom's existing documents.  Everybody we encountered in their office is so friendly and helpful - they made the whole process non-intimidating and easy to understand and helped us think through all the various issues.  We are very happy with the outcome and I highly recommend them. 415-944-9406

Jeanne Darrah, a solo practitioner in SF, is fantastic. She went into this practice area out of a strong desire to help ease end of life concerns. She is empathetic and reasonably priced. When updating my in-laws’ documents (my father in law was dying and my mother in law has dementia) she traveled to their home in the East Bay. Please let her know I referred you.

-Lisa Feldstein 

We had a great experience with Anne Wenger from Mc Laughlin Legal. They are in San Diego, but really you could just see her via zoom.... it was excellent and a great price for a Trust, will, etc etc 

anne [at] mclaughinlegal.com

Hi, seeing two recommendations for Summerall Law here, I just feel compelled to provide a counterpoint. We had a TERRIBLE experience with them, TWICE. We should have not used them again after the first time, but we were hoping it was a fluke, and unfortunately it wasn't. If you are using them just make sure you read EVERY WORD of the legalese in their documents and make very sure you understand it all. We did that and realized in some places the documents did NOT represent our wishes - in some rather scary ways. If we hadn't invested a lot of hours to do this and follow up on anything that was unclear, we would have never known. So just be very sure you understand what EVERYTHING means before you finalize, and don't just assume they get it right because they are the experts. It's tempting to use them because they take the workplace legal plans which makes them affordable. We fell for that. But knowing what we know now we would have rather paid full fare at a better place.