I had my trust drafted in 2012.
I never heard from my attorney again.
Not a check-in. Not a question about whether I had funded the trust. Not a note when tax law changed, when my business grew, or when my family circumstances shifted. Nothing for thirteen years, until he sent a letter announcing his retirement and introduced his replacements.
I reached out. I was ready to re-engage. Thirty-plus years of relationship, more than $10 million in legal fees routed to that firm across my companies and connections, dozens of referrals I personally made. I was deeply connected to the late namesake of the firm. I was not a cold lead. I was as warm as a client gets.
The replacement T&E lawyers made clear they were interested in drafting my new trust documents. No genuine curiosity about my situation, no win-win interest. No interest in anything beyond the transaction in front of them. They saw a billable matter. I saw a door closing.
Here is what they did not understand: I was not frustrated because I wanted special treatment. I was frustrated because they were commoditizing a relationship that I had spent decades building, and they did not even notice. The trust drafting I could get anywhere. The relationship was what I was offering them, and they walked right past it.
I am not a rare case. The clients I have spoken with describe the same experience in different words, but with the same feeling. Our survey data reflects exactly this pattern at scale. Clients who have engaged T&E firms are disappointed. Not just in the product, but in the relationship. They feel abandoned after binder delivery. They feel used like a one-night stand, like you truly do not care or value them.
This is not a sustainable business strategy. You open the front door, get the documents signed, and hand over the binder walking out of the back door … like a package on a conveyor belt. So your firm can move on to the next client coming in the front door.
And here is the harder truth: most clients will never tell you. They will just quietly drift toward someone else like their financial adviser, or give up on the process entirely, trust unfunded and relationship essentially over.
The best T&E attorneys I have encountered understand something different. They understand that the binder delivery is not the finish line. It is the beginning of a longer relationship with someone who just showed you the most important parts of their life. They follow up. They check in. They treat funding the trust as part of the job, not a detail left to the client to figure out alone.
That is what earns the referrals. That is what earns the calls when life changes. That is what earns the kind of loyalty that turns one client into ten.
I am still looking for that attorney. I suspect many of your clients are too.
This is the reason why I ended up building a platform to help address this problem, it is called TrustFunder. It helps law firms strengthen the relationships with their clients post binder delivery, by providing true value to their clients. If you are a T&E firm ready to close the back door and build the kind of client relationships that compound over time, check out our demo and let’s talk about how we can help.
Kevin Groman is an Arizona attorney and is currently the founder and CEO of TrustFunder, a legal technology platform built for T&E firms to close the execution gap so client’s trusts are actually funded. He spent the first two decades of his career as Corporate Counsel, with public companies such as PetSmart and RSC Equipment Rentals, before serving as CEO of an emerging growth energy services company. He has since built startups, founded a venture capital fund, and focused on philanthropic work. He is also founder of Crown Canyon, a Paradise Valley ultra-luxury estate community. He is an Adjunct Professor at ASU, a member of the Arizona Supreme Court Commission on Access to Justice and Executive Director for the nonprofit The Welcome to America Project.
