Will party handles an awkward issue

When there’s a will, there’s a way to party.

MINNEAPOLIS-ST. PAUL STAR TRIBUNE

The party was in full swing at Tony and Sarah Beth Seguin’s Woodbury, Minn., home on a recent night. As children ran about, their parents stood around the kitchen island, their wills in hand. You read that right. Wills, not wine.

Welcome to a will-signing party, more useful than a Tupperware party and more productive than a book club.

Directing traffic in the center of it all was Marjorie Holsten, a Maple Grove, Minn., real-estate and estate-planning lawyer, who has been doing will parties for a decade.

Over the years, the mother of two heard the same complaint: Wills are too expensive. But with her group will-signings, the price is $75 per person, $150 per couple.

Here’s how she does it: An organized pal gets a group of families together and sets up two meetings. The first 90-minute session addresses “if you die, what do you want to do with your stuff and what do you want for your kids,” Holsten said. She also passes out a questionnaire designed to gather the information she needs about guardians and assets for the wills. Then she answers the group’s questions.

Later, couples e-mail additional questions, and finally, their wishes, to Holsten. She drafts the wills and sends back a draft. The clients can e-mail changes to Holsten.

Sarah Beth learned about Holsten through a friend of a friend. Writing a will had been on the family’s to-do list since her 9-month-old daughter, Avery, was born.

And because she was with friends, in her own living room, the experience was much less painful than she imagined, she said between acting as a witness. Her bonus for wrangling the group — a free will for herself and her husband.

When asked what he thought about the idea, Robert McLeod, an estate-planning attorney with Lindquist and Vennum, said “the stuffed-shirt response would be, ‘That’s not the way we handle our attorney-client relationships.’ But he believes the concept creatively addresses a key problem that all estate-planning attorneys face — getting clients to start a will and to finish it.

His only concern: in front of friends and neighbors, families might not reveal secrets that should be addressed. It’s tough enough to discuss them in a lawyer’s office.

Even Holsten acknowledges that confidential information could come out in these meetings, and that couples might regret it later. But she figures “a lot of us are in the very same boat,” and that good things about the group nature outweigh the bad.

Massachusetts-based lawyer James Haroutunian started
Willparties.com last year.

Every time the father of two would get together with other parents, they’d bring up their lack of a will and their need to give him a call. But the calls would never come, and he’d hear the same excuses: No time. His wife and her friends had time for other home-based sales parties for wine, jewelry and food, so the will-party idea was born.

Haroutunianhas conducted 15 to 20 of the events, which work best for families who have simple situations, he says.

He suggests families with more complex scenarios set up an appointment in his office. He hopes to have a network of lawyers partying in all 50 states.