When advisors don't work well together, a family or estate owner may not want to run interference, as getting everyone together in the same room is costly. Failing to do so, however, can result in some assets going missing.
Even a plan that starts out based on a complete accounting will be thrown out of whack if the estate owner does not come in to update it after a big life event like marriage or the sale of a business. Oversights like this are more common than one might think.
An example of this, says Kroch, might be a family whose business was just beginning when the plan was made but "didn't call back to the lawyer and say, 'What do you know, we had the IPO.'"
When the end finally comes and a person dies, trustees and executors are almost bound to discover something they didn't know. In the most extreme cases, the surprise is the estate itself, because an executor can be named in a document without knowing in advance.
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