When you head to your attorney’s office, it’s best to have your plan together so that you can be efficient with the time you’re paying for. Unfortunately, not every farm family has a plan when it comes to a farm succession.
Justin Randall is an associate attorney at Hooper Law Office, heading up the area of farm succession planning. He walks us through the “dos and don’ts” when you’re going through the process with a lawyer.
“The biggest red flag is having no plan at all and just assuming it’s going to work out, which we’ve occasionally run into: ‘the kids will figure that out.’ You don’t want to let that happen because that’s where you’re just asking for there to be disputes,” he says. “Other red flags might be that there’s this spoken promise of what’s going to happen, but it’s not written down. So who knows, if dad becomes incapacitated, are we sure if that’s what dad actually wanted?”
Some other problems that should be taken care of before you start the clock for an attorney’s billable hours — make sure expectations are realistic. Randall says sometimes, successors don’t have reasonable expectations with the timeline or terms of a farm transition.
“We’ve worked with families where there’s a fair amount of debt on farms… and the next generation won’t want that debt,” he says. “Realistically, though, how are they going to succeed their parents if they don’t take on that debt? Having realistic expectations can solve a lot of those problems.”
