““now now, I know you really meant this, not what you wrote, why don’t you go back and rewrite this and come back next Thursday?””
Yeah, because in the estate field, the guy who knew what he meant, and could explain it, is dead.
Even if he/she is/was not dead....they have may have transitioned from mentally competent to mentally incompetent (in the case of where you discover an error in the trust/will/estate and go try to change it) Maybe nobody read the will real closely before then....suddenly, on a close read, you discover something hinky.
That will cost you about $25K-$35K to have a conservator appointed. And they damn well know that you are completely stuck without them and will charge accordingly.
And I will add yet another aspect, one among many where amateurs simply do not have the experience to arrive at what will prove to be very, very obvious conclusions-——AFTER the damage has been done. And these situations typically have very large financial impacts, sometimes devastating.
Anyone who performs work on behalf of an estate administrator knows with perfect certainty that if YOU identify yourself as the admin, as you surely will, then whatever THEY charge comes out of the estate; meaning it is not YOUR money. NEVERTHELESS, they equally well understand that you get NONE of the estate money until they work their voodoo.
That means that they can charge whatever the hell they want to and you are in essence completely powerless to do very much about it. You want to get snippy with them? They will withhold their work product and you’ll just have to buy it again. Or they will file a lien on the estate.
Do you know this going in? No, you don’t. You are a naif. You think either someone is out to charge their normal fee, which is fine, or to help you out of a bad situation out of sympathy. Neither of those is true.