About Us

“I did not have time to write you a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead,” Mark Twain.

In most circumstances, estate planning does not need to be elaborate.  If you don’t have complicated assets or a complex family situation, then you probably only need a simple and practical estate plan.  You don’t need to pay for legal work that may be overly cumbersome for you and your family.  Practical Plans is designed to help people use their own judgment to create an effective but reasonable estate plan — but while still allowing them to be secure in knowing that their plan was individually reviewed by an estate planning attorney.

The vision for Practical Plans came from Mark Powell, a California attorney certified as a specialist in estate planning, trust and probate law by the State Bar of California Board of Legal Specialization and selected by Worth Magazine as one of the top 100 estate planning attorneys in the country.  In his private practice, Mark has planned for estates that range in value from a few hundred thousand dollars to over a billion dollars.  He recognized that for most people a simple plan is better than a complicated one.  Most estate planning attorneys, however, want to work with big estates and advanced planning techniques.  Practical Plans is designed to help people create efficient estate plans that work.  Click here to learn more about Mark.

Curtis Kaiser, a California attorney whose practice focuses on business and estate planning, shared this vision.  And with experience in technology and an entrepreneurial spirit, Curtis believed that an online version of Practical Plans would encourage people to take the important step of completing their estate plans.  Click here to learn more about Curtis.

The interactive Practical Plans process walks you through the issues in plain English and helps clients make their own decisions about how their plans should work.  Although other estate planning web sites exist, Practical Plans is unique in that every plan is individually reviewed by an estate planning attorney – at no extra charge – to confirm that the plan makes sense.

Practical Plans responds to Mark Twain’s idea – people aren’t impressed when you make things complicated; they are impressed when you help them understand.