Yes, you read that right.

Looking back, Jennifer doesn’t even know how she did it. She was one of the oldest students in her classes, and at times she felt overwhelmed.

Because of her experience, she was drawn to an internship with the Office of Chief Counsel of the IRS. During one case, the judge was fascinated by her story. “Don’t ever give up on your dream,” he told her.

But even as she was finishing school in 2013, Jennifer wasn’t quite sure what area of law she wanted to practice.

She didn’t want to give up all of the tax knowledge and experience she had earned in her previous career, but she wanted to focus on helping people.

At first, estate planning didn’t seem like a viable option. Jennifer knew that her tax experience could come in handy — most lawyers underestimate how much tax is really involved in estate planning — but she hated her first estate planning class.

It wasn’t until she accepted a position as her professor’s law clerk (she’d received the highest grade in the class) that she began to learn how much she could really help people through estate planning. And her big firm experience proved just how true that really was.

From the beginning, she loved helping clients avoid probate. She loved helping them learn to have conversations about difficult topics.

And she loved helping them sleep better at night knowing their families were taken care of.

The importance of estate planning took a more personal turn when Jennifer’s grandmother died.

Her grandmother had an estate plan in place, but it didn’t take all the details into account, and her family was dragged through a 2-year process of fighting and bickering in the courts.

It wasn’t the money people fought over — it was the things that weren’t specifically designated in the estate plan, and the memories that those things represented. People fought over her grandmother’s wedding ring, the art hanging up in the house, the Christmas china.

For Jennifer, all she wanted was her favorite purple mug from her grandmother’s house. Thankfully, she got it. But the entire process of family feuding only made her grandmother’s loss that much more difficult.

Then in late 2019, Jennifer had another experience that confirmed her belief in estate planning. Her appendix ruptured suddenly, forcing her into emergency surgery and hospitalization.

She did have an estate plan but had made 102 excuses to always put off getting it notarized. And she quickly realized on a personal level the importance of an estate plan not just for when someone dies, but for when they become incapacitated, as well.