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Yes, you can set up a Trust without a lawyer. But setting up a Trust on your own comes with risks that the document may not meet state requirements, reflect your true wishes, or properly hold your assets. A lawyer can give you a knowledgeable eye as you create a Trust that fits your estate planning goals.
You can set up a Trust without a lawyer. There’s no rule that says a lawyer has to set up your Trust for it to be valid. So “can you” is the wrong question. “Should you” is the better question here.
Trusts can affect your home, savings, family responsibilities, and what happens to your property after you die. Families often don’t notice mistakes until a loved one is gone and they’re trying to use their Trust. That’s why so many people get legal help instead of relying on a DIY form.
With a LegalShield® Premium Personal Plan, members can more affordably involve a provider law firm in the process.
Preparing a solid Trust often involves these steps:
This is not an exhaustive list of everything you might need. State law, for instance, might call for specific language, signatures, notarization, witnesses, and other formal steps.
DIY Trusts are often built on templates, and lawyer-drafted Trusts tend to be from-scratch, personalized documents.
DIY Trusts tend to start with templates or online forms that you fill out yourself. That almost always costs less upfront, but the form or template can only respond to the inputs you give it. So the form might miss issues involving family structure, assets, state law, tax concerns, and funding the Trust.
Generally speaking, lawyers who prepare Trusts can ask questions about your homes, accounts, beneficiaries, and more, which a generic template may not handle well. Your answers to these questions can lead to a more complete end product that does what you actually intend.
About the financial trade-off: Fully DIY Trust preparation is often cheaper, but there’s a higher risk of adding legal costs and delays that use up those savings with a pen stroke.
Trusts involving a lawyer can cost over $5,000. LegalShield legal subscription plans are a middle ground between cheap templates and the expense of hiring a law firm yourself. Premium plans include Trust creation by a vetted law firm, giving you the help you’re looking for at an affordable monthly fee.
Online templates do a good job of making DIY Trusts seem simple, but mistakes often don’t reveal themselves until you’re not around to explain what you meant. Let’s take a close look at the risks:
States make their own Trust rules. A DIY form that works in Ohio might not have the right language, signing procedure, witness rules, or notarization requirements for Florida. If you have a home in two states, where you are considered a resident also matters.
To be clear, that doesn’t always mean the whole Trust fails. But these issues can spark confusion, delays, and disputes when those are the last things your family needs.
Small DIY mistakes like missing names, unclear instructions, and conflicts with other documents can cause the Trust to fail at doing its intended job. In these cases, falling apart can look like Trustees not understanding your wishes or ambiguity leading to family disputes.
Creating the Trust is Act I. Act II is funding it. Funding a Trust means transferring assets into it so the Trustee can distribute them according to your wishes. Leaving things out of the Trust can mean your family must still deal with account access issues and disputes—exactly the things you were trying to avoid. Lawyers can catch those mistakes and help you fund your trust, especially if it involves business interests or real property deeds.
Some family and financial situations need more planning than a DIY Trust can reasonably handle. This includes blended families, minor children, beneficiaries with special needs, property in multiple states, and business interests.
Generic forms struggle to help you think through the real-life consequences of decisions surrounding complex issues like these. Where DIY struggles with this aspect of Trusts, lawyers tend to thrive.
When you select a Trustee, a DIY form may not help you understand whether that person can do the job, whether they’re legally eligible, or whether state law is going to throw any roadblocks later on.
Gauging trustworthiness is even more challenging for forms and templates. Your Trustee, the person who will manage the Trust, may get access to sensitive financials. Plus, you’re trusting them to carry out your final wishes. If they’re disorganized, overwhelmed, or likely to encounter conflict with family members, they may not be up to the job.
And what happens if your chosen Trustee dies, can’t be reached, or becomes ineligible to serve? That’s where successor Trustees can come in. These are the kinds of things an actual lawyer is much more likely than an online form to help you think through.
Every Trust has one of two legal structures: Revocable or Irrevocable. Within those structures, you’ll find a variety of Trust types, including Supplemental Trusts and Gifting Trusts. The wrong choice here can affect control, flexibility, taxes, and a lot more.
A DIY document may point to the wrong type of Trust with no mechanism to warn you that that’s happening. A lawyer, on the other hand, can help you understand what type of Trust you need and draft it up to all applicable standards.
Trusts are easy to misunderstand and hard to fix later, particularly if the issues come up after you’ve passed. That’s why a lawyer is often a good idea for any type of Trust and each stage of establishing one.
That’s even more true for situations with any type of complexity: blended families, beneficiaries with supplemental needs, business ownership, Trusts that need to work with a Will or prenuptial agreement, or complex family dynamics, for example.
In those kinds of situations, a lawyer can help you understand how to open a Trust, choose the right kind, draft clear instructions, name the right Trustee and successors, and understand how to fund the Trust.
Setting up a Trust without a lawyer is possible, but whether it’s the right approach is another question entirely. Legal guidance can be helpful for such a major estate planning decision.
With a LegalShield Premium Personal Plan, you get access to a provider law firm that offers Revocable Living Trust preparation for a more affordable fee and legal support right from the start.
If it meets your state’s requirements, names the right parties, is signed correctly, and includes identifiable Trust property, a DIY Trust can be valid. But the DIY process can let mistakes sneak in, and those mistakes can sometimes affect validity.
When a Trust isn’t properly funded, assets get left outside of the Trust. That can mean those assets have to go through probate, as well as the accompanying delays and confusion.
Yes, you can typically have a lawyer review a Trust you created yourself. And that might sound like a solid middle ground, but a review may not fix every issue if you built the Trust on the wrong form, left out key language, or designed it for the wrong purpose. A LegalShield Premium Personal Plan can give you affordable access to a lawyer-created Trust.
Content Specialist at LegalShield, creating educational resources about legal and consumer protection topics. She focuses on making complex legal and financial concepts accessible to readers and has contributed to various educational articles on consumer rights and protections.
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