What This Year’s Heckerling Conference Means for Clients

The Heckerling Institute on Estate Planning convened its 60th annual gathering last week in Orlando, Florida. 

While the conference itself is highly technical, one of the most consequential themes this year was not a new planning technique, but the removal of a forcing function resulting from recent legislative changes. For the first time in years, families are no longer planning against a fixed expiration date that dictates timing.

The absence of that deadline fundamentally changes the nature of the planning conversation. Rather than being driven by “use it or lose it” decisions, planning can shift toward long-term guidance focused on how structures will function over time, across changing family dynamics, evolving asset profiles, governance decisions, and real human behavior, and on helping clients navigate complexity rather than simply act on it.

This shift places greater emphasis on clarity and understanding. As planning structures remain in place longer and are more likely to be tested in real time, the ability for clients to understand how their plans actually work, not just how they were designed, becomes increasingly critical — and is reshaping how advisors think about their tools and the role technology plays in supporting that shift.

Planning Without an Imminent Deadline

The One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) eliminated the previously scheduled sunset that would have reduced transfer tax exemption levels. While future administrations and Congress can always change the rules, the absence of an automatic rollback has fundamentally altered how long planning decisions are likely to remain in place.

For clients, this changes the emotional tone of planning. Decisions no longer need to be rushed, but they still carry long-term consequences. The risk has shifted from missing a deadline to making choices that persist for years without being fully understood.

This matters because many existing plans were created under the assumption that the rules were temporary. OBBBA altered that assumption. As wealth begins to move and plans are actually administered, families are discovering that decisions made years ago may now last far longer than originally intended.

Stability for now does not mean certainty forever. It allows for more thoughtful planning, but it also raises the importance of clarity and shared understanding.

From Transactions to Intentional Strategy

As urgency recedes, estate planning is shifting away from one-time transactions and toward long-term systems.

From a client’s perspective, this distinction matters. Clients don’t experience planning as a series of isolated steps; they experience it as an ongoing framework that governs control, access, responsibility, and family dynamics over decades.

A recurring theme this year was the gap between what clients believe their plans accomplish and how those plans actually function once discretion, timing, and human behavior enter the picture. That gap often doesn’t appear at signing; it shows up later, during administration.

As a result, the focus of planning discussion continues to shift to questions clients often deprioritize:

• Does this structure still make sense if circumstances change?
  
  
• Who actually has decision-making authority, and under what constraints?
  
  
• What happens after the documents are signed and the plan is put into motion?
  

Planning success is no longer measured by how efficiently a strategy is implemented, but by how well it holds up over time. Helping clients understand the systems they are creating, rather than simply completing transactions, is becoming central to effective planning.

Trusts Are Not Static — Even If Many Clients Assume They Are

One of the persistent challenges underscored this year is not how trusts function, but how they are perceived by clients.

Modern trusts frequently span jurisdictions, asset classes, and generations. That structural complexity means governance, administration, and discretion play an ongoing role long after the initial planning conversation has ended.

Despite careful drafting and explanation, many clients still view a trust as a fixed legal container — something that is “set” once documents are signed. In reality, trusts are living structures. They evolve as assets change, as distributions occur, and as decisions are made by trustees and beneficiaries over time.

What continues to surface in practice is that complexity often emerges later. Issues arise not at execution, but during administration — when trusts begin distributing income, when beneficiary circumstances change, or when decision-making authority is tested. Many of these challenges do not stem from flawed documents, but from assumptions that go unexamined about cooperation, alignment, and stable relationships. When those assumptions fail, even well-designed trusts can behave in ways clients never anticipated.

The takeaway underscored this year is familiar but increasingly consequential: the work doesn’t end at drafting. In a post-OBBBA environment where planning structures are likely to remain in place longer, helping clients understand how trusts will function over time — and under conditions that differ from those assumed at the outset — is often what determines whether a well-designed plan succeeds.

Looking Ahead

Taken together, these discussions underscore a practical shift in the profession: as estate plans are administered over longer periods of time, the adoption of technology that supports clarity and shared understanding is becoming increasingly important.  

Artificial intelligence and its applications were far more visible at Heckerling this year than in the past — not as abstract innovation, but as part of a practical conversation about how advisors support clients beyond initial design. The focus has moved from whether technology belongs in trusts and estates work to how it can help advisors and clients better understand, manage, and communicate around complex planning structures as they operate in real time.

This is where Luminary plays an important role, connecting the wealth transfer ecosystem around a shared data foundation that supports clarity and continuity as plans move from design to administration.

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