Tara (00:50):
Hello. It is Tara Lucke back for our very first episode of 2026. Thank you so much for tuning in. I hope this episode is finding you rejuvenated after a restful break and full of excitement for the year to come.
(01:11):
And look, if you're still a bit foggy and haven't quite jumped back into work, that's totally fine as well. Today's episode is not going to be a technically challenging brain busting episode. It's actually a little bit about me and my story. So I kind of feel a bit narcissistic doing this episode, but I've just had lunch with one of our beautiful members, Adele Anthony, of your legacy lawyer. And we were talking about the podcast and I said, "I still haven't really done an episode introducing myself." And she told me to pull my finger out and just get it done and do it. So thank you, Adele. I'm here. And if you're just here for the technical content, that's fine. You can just skip this episode if you like. But if you've been listening or you're new and you actually don't really know my story or my background, then hopefully this episode gives you a little bit of context about why I show up and do what I do in the art of estate planning and my story.
(02:19):
And I hope some of it resonates with you. Maybe you'll learn something from it or at least feel like you know me a little bit better. So thank you for tuning in. I honestly appreciate every one of you who listens. By the way, on that note, if you happen to be listening on your podcast Player of Choice, if you could leave me a review, that would be incredible because the more reviews we get helps tell the algorithm and the systems about the podcast being of interest to people, and it means we can reach more estate planning lawyers with the podcast. So if you can leave review just like a rating is fine. You don't have to write anything even. That would be incredible. I would be so indebted to you. Also, if there are any topics that you want to hear on the podcast and that you want me to cover, feel free to email them through to us at [email protected] and I can make sure we try and address that for you.
(03:17):
So all about my story and why I do what I do. So firstly, let's just start with a recap on what even is the Art of Estate Planning. So The Art of Estate Planning is a education and precedence business where we provide estate planning precedents, estate planning education, and mentoring support to estate planning lawyers. And my main focus and mission is on testamentary trust. So my personal mission is to support and educate more lawyers on the benefits of testamentary trusts and support lawyers on drafting and advising clients for testamentary trust so that we have a greater take up of testamentary trusts in Australia. So that's testamentary trust. If you know I'm your girl, that is our main focus here. But of course, we can't just look at things with our blinkers on and we look to cover a whole range of estate planning topics.
(04:19):
But my sort of core passion is around testamentary trust. So I thought I might start, I guess, just by going through my resume. Not that I even have a resume like who has one these days when you've been self-employed for so long, but maybe I can take you down a trip down memory lane. So wine back almost 18 years ago where Baby Tara was a new graduate from her law and accounting degree. And I had been given a graduate position at a law firm in Brisbane, Queensland called McCullough Robertson Lawyers. So if you're in Queensland, you probably are familiar with the firm because it's like the biggest law firm in Queensland, but it is mostly based in Queensland. So if you're outside of Queensland or Brisbane, you probably don't even know about it, but I was extremely thrilled to have gotten that offer as a grad.
(05:24):
And I actually would say to anyone who is a law student or going through that position, it only takes one. I only got one offer. I think I had about 20 interviews at law firms and I got one offer at McCullough Robertson and it completely changed the trajectory of my life and my career. So just hold out hope for that one offer. And if it doesn't work out, there are so many ways to get on the path that you want to be, and there's so many options available and pathways that you might not even be alert to. So just trust the process. I know it is a challenging time and I really feel for you for anyone going through it, but you trust what comes your way and that it is going to be the right path for you. So I actually grew up in Bundaberg, which is where I live now.
(06:22):
I've come full circle about 20 years later, but I was thrilled to be living the big city life in Brisbane and starting out as a graduate lawyer. So in 2008, I started my graduate law position, went through the PLT or practical legal training, and at the end of the year was admitted. And throughout that time, I did, they call it rotations. So McCullough Robertson was like a full service firm, except it didn't do family law and criminal law and personal injuries. So I did a rotation in corporate law and then a rotation in the structuring group. I actually had my heart set on being a tax lawyer and I was trying and trying to get into the tax team, but they didn't have any spots for me because they had another gun graduate in my year who took the spot. And so I was in structuring, which was like the next best thing.
(07:24):
It was like the little cousin to the tax team. And in our structuring team, like what does structuring even mean? It was just a made up word that basically meant we practised in estate planning, tax, asset protection, business succession, and a bit of like stamp duties. But we were like this hybrid team because McCullough Robertson had its own tax team. It had a separate stamp duty team. It had a separate estate planning team that mostly did like litigation and administration, but a bit of upfront estate planning. And we were like a hybrid of all of these in the structuring team where we did a mix of it. So as you know, estate planning is my jam now, but when it came to estate planning in my structuring group, we mostly did upfront estate planning, so no estate admin or litigation, anything related to those matters went to the pure technical estate planning team and we incorporated a lot of like asset protection and business structures and restructures into our estate planning.
(08:37):
So we were quite holistic in terms of the bigger picture of what is the group structure here. So you're probably getting the vibe that a lot of our clients were on the high net wealth end. So we had a lot of trading entities and investment vehicles, looking at those structures, advising on setting them up, refining them for asset protection improvements, looking at restructuring them into more suitable structures, including accessing tax exemptions or rollovers, stamp duty exemptions, and also a lot of business succession as well. So partnership agreements, shareholders agreements, insurance funded, buy, sell. I actually ended up staying in that group for seven years. I sort of worked my way through to being a senior associate. And yeah, when I say worked my way through, I really worked myself to the bone. The culture was sort of, the better you do, the more work you get.
(09:39):
It was almost like the pride in having a MCR, McCullough Robertson for Life Tattoo going on. And I really didn't know any better because I'd never worked anywhere else. So I was child-free. I was young. I just started that job straight out of uni. So I was under 30 doing all of this, eating like most meals at my desk, including dinner, working 14-hour days, getting cab home every night. I'd go to the gym or yoga class at like five o'clock, but then I'd go back to the office and keep working. And for a while there, I loved it. I loved that suits type life and learnt so much on the job and really threw myself into it. But I also, I'd be sitting there in my window office looking at the Brisbane River from the 11th story, like just sitting there going, "How does this work if I ever want to get married and have kids?" Because this lifestyle is not really sustainable for that.
(10:51):
But anyway, pushed that to the back of my mind and I was promoted to senior associate. And then come 2014, I actually had an opportunity to leave McCullough Robertson and set up or be one of the four founding partners of a boutique law firm. And this had come about because our structuring team was always kind of the black sheep at McCullough Robertson, at least from my perspective. The firm on a whole was, and probably still is, very focused on time billing and time sheets and time recording, but we did everything on a fixed priced basis. We were offshoring to South Africa and the Philippines, and the firm generally hated that idea. We were very focused on automation and technology. And again, early adopters of that in a firm, think about the size of the firm. I think there was like 500 lawyers when I was there.
(12:02):
So it was just like this massive cruise ship. Nothing could be done swiftly. If you wanted to pivot or change direction, it was like death by a thousand committee meetings. So there was this constant tension of us wanting to run our practise for private clients in a particular way in a larger firm that also had different and specified procedures where a lot of their clients were corporate. So it just was like not a natural fit. So we got to the point where we actually left and set up a boutique estate planning and asset protection and tax firm called View Legal. Actually, I should mention ... Oh, I keep getting sidetracked. Before we did that, we actually founded through McCullough Robertson ... Well, sorry, I didn't found it. I was part of the team who worked on it, but it wasn't like my brain idea or anything, but we had a team that was part of the structuring team and it was a business called eLawyer.
(13:07):
And so it was one of the first digital estate planning platforms. Now, it's not like SafeWill or any of those online will platforms that you see now. This was a wholesale offering to financial advisors and accountants who wanted to facilitate estate planning. So they had the engagement with the client. They would send through the instructions. We would use technology to produce the wills, and then we would have an online meeting with the referring advisor and the clients, the testators, and the people, we do their powers of attorney and all of that as well. And so it was pretty much like a standard estate planning process, but we relied very heavily on the referring advisor to collate a lot of the background information and then a lot on technology and digital online meetings, which pre- 2014 was everyone's doing Zooms and Teams meetings now, but it was actually not common at all to be doing online meetings, especially in the estate planning space back then.
(14:18):
So eLawyer was one of the organisations that I was involved in setting up. We left E-lawyer behind when we left McCullough Robinson and at View Legal, we set up our bespoke private practise, but also a e-lawyer equivalent, so an online wholesale platform. And I actually ended up running the online wholesale platform where we delivered wholesale estate planning documents through financial advisors and accountants. So I had a lot of experience supervising and settling all of those documents. I would settle about 10 sets of wills a day. So obviously we had to invest really heavily in our testamentary trust will precedents and all of our estate planning workflows and automations to make sure that it was customised to reflect the client instructions. The quality was really high, but we could also produce it at a high volume. So I think, I don't know if I've mentioned it, but it was a low cost product.
(15:24):
You could sort of get a couple with their testamentary trust wills and powers of attorney and letter of wishes for under $1,000, which at the time was very novel. And I ran and supervised that team for quite a while. So when we set up ViewLegal, I was thrilled. I had reached the milestone of being a partner of a law firm before I was 30. So that was in 2014, I think I was 29, and that was great, but also really interesting because the way that our firm was structured, it was the partner from our team at McCullough Robinson and then three of his senior associates. And I had worked for this one partner since 2007 as a university research student. So that transition of our relationship from university student to co-partner was really challenging and it was hard to say in terms of being seen as a peer.
(16:31):
The entire environment that I worked in at McCullough Robertson and at View Legal involved a lot of micromanagement that I would think sort of veered into bullying, which I don't really want to labour that point, but I sort of need to mention that because what happened is it led to me in about 2016, 2017, going on stress leave because my anxiety ... If you've ever felt like this, I'm just so sorry you've gone through it. But you know when you like just the thought of opening your emails makes you so anxious and yeah, my anxiety was just sort of getting out of control. I was being bullied through micromanaging, even though I was a partner of the firm. It wasn't unique to me. This was just part of the culture, unfortunately, which was really hard to be a partner of a firm where you're not happy with the culture of the environment, but you're not actually in a powerful position enough to change anything.
(17:39):
So I ended up needing to take some time off for stress leave. So I stepped down, went on sick leave and yeah, had my little midlife crisis at like 31. And yeah, I had moved to the beach because we worked remotely. We didn't have an office. So I moved from Brisbane to the Gold Coast. And when I wasn't working, I just spent a lot of time soul searching, walking on the beach, lying on the beach, listening to true crime podcasts and colouring in because those colouring inbooks were like all the faiths there and I just didn't know what I was going to do. I really thought maybe being a florist sounded fun, which was completely delusional because like how stressful would being dealing with live flowers for events on the weekend be. So glad I didn't go down that path, but I really thought I would end up leaving the law and I didn't know what to do.
(18:38):
I actually ended up going to surfing lessons for something to do and met an incredible friend of mine, M Pescot, who runs Promotable You now. So she is a HR and leadership management consultant, professional guru. I don't actually know. I should have looked up what her bio says, but she knew all things about recruiting and getting jobs and helping people get the job of their dreams. And she just pushed me to start thinking about using my skills in law in a different way through online courses. So that's kind of where it started in the online course space. So I was like, are you kidding? I'm a lawyer. I don't do passive income. I don't do online courses. I'm a lawyer. I don't need to do that. But the seeds that she planted in my brain really did resonate with me. And I started learning everything I can about digital marketing and digital products and online courses.
(19:50):
And I kind of thought, actually, maybe I've got an option here at the same time. So I think I would probably say I took about six or three or four months, I can't even remember, four to six months off where I didn't work at all. And I just want to acknowledge that that was a tremendous privilege that I had to do because I didn't have any children. I didn't even have a partner or a spouse. I lived alone and I had a safety net in my bank account where I didn't need to work. I lived off the smell of an oily rag for a while and did get a bit stressed out, but financially I was able to take that leap and have the pressure off me. Whereas if I was in that same situation now that I've got a mortgage and a husband and two kids and school fees and all of that, maybe I really doubt if I would've been able to take that step.
(20:48):
And by the way, I also don't want to sound like I graciously stepped down and took some space. I went out in a fall of flames, stressed out my whole team, like pretty much just told my boss I was quitting and going on stress leave. It was not pretty. It was not graceful. I should have done it much sooner before it became this big disaster, but we just can't see that when we're in it and we think that we can keep being resilient and holding on. So yeah, I don't want to sugarcoat it. It was a mess and it was a nightmare and a very bad time. But thank God I went through that because I've come out the other side and things are so much better than I could have ever imagined them to be. So I ended up actually going back to view legal in a different role.
(21:41):
So I just did, I was like a gun for hire basically, where for that online platform, I would just come in and do the 45 minute online meeting with the testators. So I'd sort of get the brief, check it a bit beforehand, check the docs, make sure it all made sense. And then I'd meet through Zoom with the clients and explain their documents to them and answer any questions and basically tick off that requirement that they had received legal advice. So I got really good at explaining testamentary trials, explaining estate planning concepts and engaging clients in that estate planning process. And I did that sort of part-time as just however many meetings came up. There were other lawyers who did that for the firm too. So I just did a couple a day and made a bit of pocket money while I worked out what I was going to do with my life.
(22:35):
And then I ended up building my own practise. So I agreed with ViewLegal that I would go back to meeting with clients like my own matters, my own estate planning and asset protection and structuring matters. And I would just, instead of being an employee, I would be a consultant for them and we'd do a fee split. So I would sort of eat what I could kill and give them a fee for practising certificate and insurance and all of that. And then in the meantime, I went and got my principal practising certificate because we had four partners. I didn't have to have it when we set up the firm. In the meantime though, the idea of the art of estate planning was just percolating over and over. And I started thinking about what could I do and what would the business be called? And I had an incredible group of girlfriends who were also interested in similar businesses, but in different fields.
(23:34):
And we set up an accountability group. We called ourselves the beachprenters because we all lived at the beach. And every fortnight we would get together and talk about what we'd been working on, our progress, some of the challenges or issues we wanted feedback on and to keep things moving forward on the side gig of the art of estate planning. But it was slow. It took me a long time to sort of cement my idea and the name. And in the meantime, I sort of started building up my personal brand, which I actually think was key to all of this. So sort of around the time of the breakdown a little bit after, I started posting videos on social media about estate planning, not just about anything, estate planning topics and trying to sort of build up my own network of lawyers, accountants, and financial advisors.
(24:26):
And for anyone who is thinking of leaving a firm and going out on your own, I really would encourage you to start working on personal branding and get your name out there. I'd always been okay at that because the partner I'd worked for was constantly pushing us to do speaking presentations at conferences and very generous in involving us in those opportunities. So I had already sort of been used to that. But in terms of expanding my network to people beyond that sort of group of people who keep going to the same conferences, the social media and LinkedIn and Facebook was huge in terms of putting my name and face out there and building a reputation. So much so, for instance, around 2018, so I'd been back at ViewLegal for a year or so being a contractor doing my own thing where things just deteriorated to the point where it was not workable and I had to finally rip the bandaid off.
(25:31):
So 10 years later, rip the bandaid off and go on my own. Now, I just actually want to make two points about this. I really don't think I should have stayed in that environment for 10 years. I was basically started in 2007 and I left in 2018. And if I could go back and tell baby lawyer Tara anything, it would be that I did not have to work in the same firm for all that time. And look, maybe you guys know that. I think Gen Z generally knows that, but I had grown up in a family environment where my dad worked for the same employer his whole career, like 40 years or something. And I generally am quite fixed. I end up just accidentally living in my houses for like 10 years at a time. I don't really like a lot of crazy change. So I think that had something to do with it, but I really would've wished I'd had a mentor who could have told me that it was time to move on and that it wasn't so scary making a change.
(26:37):
The second thing I also wish I could have told myself is that creating mentors outside of my boss, the person who supervised me is so important and I really didn't do that. So when things became difficult, I didn't know that I had other options. I didn't know that what I was being challenged with was not normal or okay. And I really felt like the problem was me and I just had to become more resilient and better. And to be frank, what doesn't kill you does make you stronger because I think my technical training was incredibly excellent and overall it made me a better lawyer, but it also pushed me to burnout and I had to spend a lot of time and money and opportunity cost rebuilding from that burnout. And I think still like the long-term effects of stress are enormous and I really wish I had not got to that point.
(27:41):
So also if you're feeling that is you, I'm so sorry that you're in that situation and I want you to know that things will be okay and it's okay to leave and they'll always work out and your health is more important than anything and you'll be okay. You'll be totally fine. And I know it's scary, but it'll actually work out okay. I know it for you. So I was, again, jobless sitting on the beach going, "What am I going to do? " But I had, by this point, I had my side gig that I was working on that had not earned me a single dollar yet, and I had sort of regained some of my energy and vibrancy for the law. So when I'm talking about resumes at the beginning, I didn't actually even make a resume. I just had to put out there on my social media that I was out of work and I received a whole bunch of opportunities come my way from people who had been watching me and felt like they knew me and reached out.
(28:46):
So I had the opportunity to go and work as the head of estate planning and a firm on the Gold Coast. I was doing some contracting work for an accounting firm who wanted to set up an estate planning division. I also had some opportunities to join dispersed law firms, and that's actually what I ended up doing after some soul searching about my values. So that was a real turning point for me the first time I actually sat down and thought, "What do I want out of my life and my career?" I'd just been on the train tracks of finish school, get good grades, get into uni, get good grades, get a clerkship, stay employed, get promoted to senior associate, try to be a partner and just on that steady path that they tell you that you need to in a law firm without ever actually thinking, "Is this my dream? Does it align with what I need to do?"
(29:42):
And so I sat down for a while and just thought, what are the values of my life? And after having so much freedom, can I tell you that when I was out of work and living on the beach, I did not know myself Because I was starved for fresh air and the grass between my feet for so long. I spent 10 years just living on Eagle Street. I didn't live there, but I worked there and basically never going outside, never having my bare feet touch the ground. I would wake up in my apartment, go to yoga, which was in a concrete building, get a coffee underneath the concrete building, go to work in a concrete building, be there for 14 hours, never outside. I just never ever ... Even on the weekends, I'd go shopping or be in a cafe.
(30:39):
And my just soul was so soothed by actually being outdoors and at the beach and just being out in nature. It was incredible. And so a big part of me did not want to go back to that old lifestyle. I didn't know how to turn up to be on time at work anymore because I went to Sunrise Yoga over the ocean five days a week and then had a coffee with my friends and wanted to keep working from home. So I just, because I lived 50 metres from the beach, so I'd run down and go for a swim a couple of times a day. And I just didn't know how to integrate myself back in an office environment. So I had the audacity to say, "Can I keep paying for things through my career as a lawyer without going back into a formal office environment?" And so I had a big decision to make.
(31:35):
And I actually do want to, not that Zinta will listen to this, but I do want to give her some credit. So Zinta Harris of Resolve Estate Law, she is also the pioneer of collaborative practise in estates in Australia. So if you don't know Zinta, Z-I-N-T-A, Harris, go check her out. She's incredible. And Zinta called me. I distinctly remember because I was sitting on the beach when she called and I actually can't believe my audacity because we'd been playing phone tag and Zinta had like two children and was running a busy firm and was packing to take her whole family to Latvia in Europe for a trip. And she still managed to prioritise finding time to call me. I didn't even know Zinta. She wasn't a mentor. Maybe we'd met, but we weren't friends or anything then. But she had seen my video on social media and called me just to tell me that I needed to back myself and trust myself and that I had the skills to go out on my own and I didn't need to go back into a bad environment.
(32:48):
And that call from Zinta still, we're like seven or eight years in from that now has completely changed the trajectory of my career because I really had never had anyone say that to me, especially coming from a micromanagement type environment. The main message I got was like nothing I ever did was good enough. So to have Zinta tell me that she believed in me and that I could do it and she knew I had the skills to work it out was just so empowering. And yeah, so based on the little push from Zinta and just making a decision that aligned with my big audacious goals, I decided to go all in on the art of estate planning. And I also joined the Nexus Law Group, which is now called the Arch Law Group, which is like a dispersed law firm model where you're basically running your own practise, you eat what you kill, but you pay them a percentage for the centralised administration, which I loved.
(33:52):
It meant I could run my own practise, get my own clients, because I worked so hard on my personal brand, getting my clients was not a problem, but running a trust account, billing, admin, all of that I didn't want to deal with, especially because in my spare time I was setting up the art of estate planning. So that was beautiful. We did that for about three years where I was doing basically sort of like high end estate planning matters and Nexus was doing ... They would bind up the wills and send them to me to get that I could take to the signing meeting and then I'd send them back and they'd do all the safe custody and the scanning. And so it was beautiful. I got to focus on being a lawyer and giving the legal advice and none of the admin. And I did that for three years until I eventually went all in on the art of estate planning.
(34:48):
So in 2018, August 2018, it was actually my brother's birthday. I made my first sale of my online course in the art of estate planning. And initially the art of estate planning was focused on supporting accountants and financial advisors to facilitate estate planning because I had been running that estate planning platform for accountants and financial advisors. So I could see where they had knowledge gaps, areas that really made sense to them, but then other areas where they needed extra support or tools or knowledge. So my idea was the art of estate planning course would help them feel more confident and plug the gaps and also teach them how to make money from using that system. That coincided with the Royal Commission into financial advisors and a huge overhaul of the industry. So the timing was absolutely terrible because a lot of financial advisors had to go and get requalified or leave the industry.
(35:49):
So focusing on estate planning was pretty low, but we kept ticking along and I had a beautiful group of financial advisors and accountants who were passionate about estate planning, who I was so lucky to support and train. But over time, because I kept up the social media and the marketing efforts, I was attracting more and more lawyers who basically said to me, "Okay, I really like what you're saying about testamentary trust because testamentmentary trust was the main thing of my platform. How do I get into testamentary trusts? I hear what you're saying. I think they're great structure, but how do I start drafting them? Where do I get a precedent from?" So I started developing my templates into precedence for other lawyers. Now, I had been really lucky because throughout my whole career, writing precedence was just a normal part of our job. So at McCullough Robertson, we wrote all of our precedents and had our in- house precedents and we were constantly investing in them.
(36:55):
At View Legal, when we left, we had to rewrite all of our precedents because obviously that intellectual property belonged to McCullough Robertson. So we had to start from scratch and rewrite all of our precedents, which was actually quite fun because there was a lot of a big committee and a lot of opinions on what had to go into the precedence and the language and terminology used at McCullough Robertson being such a big organisation. So with View Legal, we had a lot more freedom to go, "Well, we think that's out of date. We don't need that clause. We don't need to satisfy this partner on that clause." And then when I left Vue Legal and joined Nexus Law Group, I had to write my precedence again. So I went through that whole process again and really tested what needed to be in there. And then so this was not something that was unusual to me by that time.
(37:48):
And then when it came to actually checking them to see, well, how do we make this suitable for a lawyer who didn't write them themselves, all the user notes and guidance, that was then the next evolution. And so I started putting the precedents together and the business just grew mostly through word of mouth because people started using the precedents and then they were like, "Hey, other lawyers would be like, Hey, I heard you sell precedence." And so I eventually got to the point where I was like, "I need an online store." People initially just emailed me and then I was like, "Well, here, put this money in trust and then I'll send you the precedents." And so I eventually got to the point where we have now where we have an online store, we have online training about the precedents, about how to use them, about what the clauses mean.
(38:40):
I have an online course, Testamentary Trust, the Essential Guide for Australian Lawyers. It's basically a textbook in an online course where I go through everything you need to know from a practical and technical point of view for testamentary trusts. We put up clauses on the screen and explain how they work, diagrams to show flow charts, all of that. So we've got all of the supporting resources around the precedence now. Our precedents have evolved. So we have coding for Action Step Leap, Clio, Smokeball, and no coding if you don't use those systems. I have a membership, which is probably what I'm actually most proud of. So at the time of recording, we have over 270 members in our TT Precedence Club membership. By the way, I can't change the name now, but TT Precedence Club is such a random name for a membership. I really wish I'd given that more thought.
(39:43):
But basically, it does what it says. We are all about support for people using testamentary trust presence and it is a vibrant community of new estate planning lawyers, experienced estate planning lawyers, lawyers from other areas of law like family law who are retraining and upskilling in estate planning. Everyone is welcome. If you are curious and passionate about estate planning and pushing yourself and testing yourself and also needing support, then our membership is for you. And the reason, the main reason I created the TT Precedents Club is because I was so scared when it came time to go out on my own. And even with Zinta calling me, I mean, if Zinta had not phoned me and given me that push, I actually don't know if I would've done it, but even with her pushing me and telling me to back myself, I just was so scared of not having anyone to check something with or bounce an idea off and having lost my safety net.
(40:56):
And at the time, I didn't know about this amazing community of lawyers out there. I think it was just sort of before the internet and communities were taking off, but I really felt alone. A lot of the lawyers I was connected with were middle-aged men, and I was like a 30-year-old girl, woman, but I just felt like they weren't my people, and there was a lot of posturing and ego. And the only way to connect with them was at conferences or, "Will you send me work? I'll send you work." Or worse, it's like the professional meeting actually turned into drinks at the hotel with dodgy intentions, which was not cool. So I was just like, "Oh, I'm so alone here." And I cannot believe how incredible our TT Precedents Club community is. There are so many beautiful supportive soul practitioners, boutique lawyers. Even lawyers from big firms are welcome, but it is just the most incredible way to build your connections without ego.
(42:14):
Everybody is so generous and vulnerable. It really is the most beautiful community. I know I am the face of it and the leader, but I get so much out of it. Our members are always telling me how many friendships they've made through it and professional connections, even to the point of needing to find someone to appoint for your firm's power of attorney where you're a sole practitioner who can take over the firm and triage things if something happens to you, people have been able to find connections and find someone to appoint that through our membership. I mean, I'm proud, but it's not even pride of what I've done because our members have gone and done this without me pushing them. It's because we've just got so many beautiful members who have made these friendships. So it's really nothing I can take credit for, but it's the community that I wish I'd had when I was ... Well, when my resilience was wavering, when I felt like I didn't have any other options, when I was stressed out and anxious and on burnout leave, I actually feel like if I had had this community from a junior lawyer, one year post-admission, my whole trajectory of my career would've changed.
(43:40):
And I don't regret anything because I'm so thrilled with where I'm at with the art of estate planning and what I'm able ... The absolute privilege that I get to spend my days researching and writing precedents and supporting and helping other people with their matters. That is the most highest honour and privilege, and I love it. But it was sort of like a Phoenix. The whole business is a Phoenix coming through the flames as a result of the terrible, bad time, trademark. So it would be good to get here without going through that. And if I'd had that support and community, which I don't think would've been possible because the internet just wasn't that kind of place back then, but if it had been, I just think it would've changed my career completely. So the reason I run the Art of Estate Planning is because firstly, I want all lawyers who are interested about estate planning to feel confident and empowered to deliver testamentary trusts to their clients if that's what you want.
(44:50):
I don't want to gatekeep. I had the immense privilege of working for a mentor and being trained day in, day out for years and over 10 years on testamentary trust. That was our bread and butter. And I want to pay that forward because I know not everybody gets that and it is a hard thing to learn even piecing together the random precedents and textbooks. So my legacy is to demystify testamentary trusts and help support estate planning lawyers, especially the sole practitioners or boutique lawyers who themselves are so busy serving their clients, managing their teams, being there for their families that they don't have the time to maintain their precedence, to research or stay up to date with the law. So that's what I do for our members. So I really want our estate planning lawyers to have a good life that is low stress where they have high profit on their matters and are able to show up for themselves, for their clients and for their families in the best possible way.
(45:55):
So that's what I'm all about, really, mentoring people in the community. Obviously, that's done at scale through our group. And also if you're in our group, you'll know I'm the facilitator of this community, but I'm not the only expert or the only one with the answers. I create the community and our community, The Hive does its thing and everybody teaches everyone everything. So we all learn from each other. There's support, there's bringing us to the forefront of excellence because it used to be that you had to be in a top tier firm to be delivering the highest quality work. And that is simply not the case anymore. Our sole practitioners, our boutique firms have the resources to do that through the art of estate planning. Look, I guess I'm waffling now, but hopefully if you didn't know my background, firstly, you'll see, I actually am a lawyer.
(46:55):
I still have a practising certificate. The art of estate planning is still actually an incorporated legal practise. I pay our insurance premium with Lexon each year, even though we don't give legal advice. And yeah, so I am a lawyer, even though I'm not practising traditionally as a lawyer. I've been through it. I know that my story is not uncommon and a lot of people listening will have something similar and that is just a sad state of the condition and culture of our industry. But I know that's changing and I hope that the art of estate planning is part of that change. And I just want to be there to support people to live their best life in their career. As a lawyer, use your legal degree in a way that means that you are abundant, you have a profitable practise, you feel confident in what you're doing, you are changing your client's lives and you are living your best possible life too.
(47:56):
So thank you so much for listening. I will wrap it up and I will see you next week. Take care.
