Your Family Deserves
a Plan — Not a
Courtroom Battle
When You're Gone.
Without a proper estate plan, the government decides who gets what, probate can consume 3–5% of your estate in court costs and attorney fees, and your family spends years untangling what you left behind. We help families prevent all of it — before it's too late.
no estate plan.
Are you one of them?
The System Is Not
Designed to Protect
Your Family.
Without a plan, your estate doesn't go to your family the way you intend. It goes through probate — a public, court-supervised process that can take 12–24 months, expose your assets to creditors, generate significant legal fees, and leave your family with a fraction of what you worked decades to build.
The parties who profit when you die without a plan: the probate court, the state government, and attorneys billing $300–$500/hour to sort out what you left unresolved. The party who pays for it: your family.
Complete Protection
for Every Stage
of Life.
Estate planning is not a one-size-fits-all document. The right plan depends on the size of your estate, the complexity of your family situation, your health, your business interests, and your goals for the people you leave behind. Every plan we build starts with understanding all of it.
Last Will & Testament
The foundation of every estate plan. A properly drafted will ensures your assets go to who you intend, names guardians for minor children, and designates an executor you trust to carry out your wishes — legally, without dispute.
Revocable Living Trust
The most powerful probate-avoidance tool available. A properly funded living trust passes assets to your beneficiaries privately, immediately, and without court involvement. No 18-month wait. No public record. No 3–5% probate fees.
Power of Attorney
Designates who can manage your finances, property, and legal affairs if you become incapacitated. Without this document in place, your family may need a costly court conservatorship — even if you're still alive — to manage your affairs.
Healthcare Directive
Specifies your medical wishes and designates someone to make healthcare decisions on your behalf. Without this, critical medical decisions may be made by people you wouldn't choose — or left to physicians to decide alone.
Special Needs Planning
Protecting a loved one with special needs requires careful structuring to preserve their government benefits while providing long-term financial security. A poorly drafted inheritance can disqualify them from SSI and Medicaid immediately.
Business Succession
Business owners face unique estate planning challenges. Without a succession plan, your business may be forced into a sale, liquidated, or locked in probate. We plan the transition before the transition plans itself — under far worse conditions.
“An estate plan isn't about death. It's about removing the burden from the people you love most — so they can grieve without also managing a legal crisis.”
Hargrove, Esq.
I came to estate planning after watching my own family navigate a contested probate that lasted three years, cost over $90,000, and permanently damaged relationships between people my grandfather loved. That experience is why I practice this area of law — and why I take it personally when families call me after the crisis instead of before it.
Over 24 years of practice, I've helped more than 1,400 Charleston-area families build plans that actually hold up — through family disputes, creditor claims, business changes, and second marriages. The plan that takes three hours to build with me will save your family from years of the alternative.
Every client I work with gets direct access to me — not a paralegal, not a junior associate. Estate planning is too personal to hand off.
A Complete Plan
Built in Three
Meetings or Less.
Most families come in expecting a complex, months-long process. In reality, a comprehensive estate plan for most families is completed in three structured meetings — and many straightforward plans are finished in two. The hard part isn't the paperwork. It's deciding what you want. That's what we help you think through.
We discuss your family situation, your assets, your goals, and your concerns. There is no charge for this session, no commitment required, and no sales pressure. You'll leave with a clear picture of what you have, what you need, and what it'll cost.
We draft your documents based on what we learned in Session 1. You review them in detail before signing anything. We walk through every provision in plain English, answer every question, and make revisions until everything reflects exactly what you intend.
Documents are signed, witnessed, and notarized in our office. We guide you through the funding process for any trust — ensuring that your assets are actually transferred into the trust, which is where most DIY plans fail silently.
Life changes — marriages, divorces, new children, deaths, business sales, property acquisitions. We review and update your plan whenever life events make it necessary, so your plan reflects who you are now — not who you were when you signed it.
1,400+ Families
Protected. Zero
Left to Chance.
Charleston, SC
“My father died without a will. We spent two years and over $80,000 in legal fees sorting out his estate — and it destroyed the relationship between me and my brother permanently. When I came to Catherine, I told her exactly what I'd watched happen. She made sure my children will never go through that.”
“We have a son with Down syndrome. The thought of what happens to him when we're gone kept me up at night for years. Catherine structured a special needs trust that protects his Medicaid eligibility while guaranteeing the resources he needs for the rest of his life. I finally sleep.”
“I kept putting off estate planning because I assumed it was only for wealthy people or older families. Catherine showed me in the first 20 minutes that was wrong. I'm 38, have a business and two kids, and had zero protection for any of them. She had a complete plan built for us in three weeks.”
Transparent Pricing.
No Hourly Surprises.
Most estate attorneys bill by the hour and won't give you a price until you're already in the engagement. We don't do that. Every plan is flat-fee — quoted upfront, agreed upon before we start, and fixed regardless of how many revisions it takes to get right.
A contested estate without a plan averages $50,000–$150,000 in legal fees. A properly structured plan with us starts at $1,200. That is one of the most asymmetric value decisions you will ever make.
The real cost of comparison: Online will-making tools like LegalZoom generate generic documents that often fail under challenge, don't account for SC-specific law, miss trust funding entirely, and leave families with a false sense of security. A plan that doesn't hold up under challenge is not a plan — it's a liability.
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