It was a meticulously laid out plan. Yet to this day, Leitz still thinks about an oversight that later turned into a glaring error: "We never put anything in there about what would happen if someone did not show up for work one day and never did again," she says.
Leitz and her partner started their divorce practice in July 1997. In October 1999, Leitz's partner, a pilot, died in an emergency crash landing of her plane in San Antonio.
Besides the emotional trauma of her partner's death, Leitz could have confronted a disastrous business situation, as well. She considers herself fortunate because she and her partner's siblings were quick to agree on a resolution, with Leitz writing them a check for her partner's share in the business. Yet Leitz remains amazed at the oversight, and the potential problems it could have caused. She even remembers one day in the office, during their first year in business, when she and her partner talked about how they needed to get life insurance for one another. But it was something they put off.
"We were both so young, and we had other things on our mind," she says. "At the time of the conversation, neither of us had hit 40. We were two healthy women feeling we were pretty safe before we hit the middle-age barrier."
It's a classic case of advisors not following their own advice, Leitz says. If it had been a client in that situation, Leitz would have been adamant about the need for life insurance and a contingency plan in the event of death.
"I'd be on them," she says. "You really need to at least address what happens in the event of a death and, as soon as you can afford it, you need to at least buy some policies on each other."
Giving In To Clients
Among the biggest mistakes an advisor can make, it seems, is to forget that the job of an advisor is to give clients advice-not the other way around.
That about sums up the view of some advisors, who say the biggest mistakes they've made in their careers is to let clients walk them down a path they knew in their hearts was wrought with pitfalls, landmines, dead-ends and doom.
It took Stephan Quinn Cassaday, president and founder of Cassaday & Company Inc. in McLean, Va., a few years to learn that he was falling into this trap. When Cassaday started his business in 1993, he thought his biggest mistake was spending 17 years working at wirehouses. He left the wirehouse business because he wanted to give his clients objective advice without conflicting pressures.
"What ended up happening is that being objective and impartial isn't the whole deal," Cassaday says. "You can be honest and have integrity and still be a knucklehead."