Description
Estate Planning Services by Investment Advisers: Fiduciary Boundaries, Digital Tools, and UPL Risk
This course teaches investment adviser representatives, CCOs, and advisory firm principals how to identify and manage the legal and compliance risks that arise when non-attorney investment adviser representatives discuss estate planning, coordinate with estate planning professionals, review beneficiary and titling issues, or recommend digital estate planning platforms. The course emphasizes fiduciary duty, conflicts of interest, disclosure, supervision, client communications, due diligence, cybersecurity/privacy, recordkeeping, and unauthorized practice of law boundaries.
Learning Objectives
Upon completing this course, participants will be able to:
- Differentiate permissible estate-planning education and financial planning support from legal advice that may trigger UPL concerns.
- Identify fiduciary duty, conflict, disclosure, supervision, privacy, cybersecurity, and recordkeeping issues arising when advisers discuss estate planning or recommend digital estate planning tools.
- Evaluate common high-risk activities, including document drafting, platform data entry, beneficiary-designation recommendations, attorney referrals, trust funding coordination, and post-signing implementation tracking.
- Apply a practical due diligence framework to digital estate planning platforms and related third-party service providers.
- Determine what policies, client disclosures, training, documentation, and escalation procedures should be considered before a firm offers estate-planning-related services.
- Respond appropriately to client questions about wills, trusts, powers of attorney, probate, tax, and legal document language without crossing into legal advice.
- Recognize adviser liability risks that can arise when children, stepchildren, former spouses, or other disappointed heirs challenge beneficiary designations, account titling, transfer-on-death arrangements, or trust implementation after a client dies.
Instructor(s)
Bryan Hill, President of RIA Compliance Consultants, Inc.
Jarrod James, Senior Vice President of RIA Compliance Consultants, Inc.
Audience
Investment Adviser Representatives; Supervisors; Compliance Professionals and Executives
Continuing Education
IAR CE: This course has been approved by NASAA as an IAR CE Course providing two hours of credit in the Ethics & Professional Responsibility category.
There are several additional requirements before you are eligible to receive credit:
- Login – You must be logged in during the live presentation under your email address. You cannot be logged in under someone else’s email address.
- View Entire Live Presentation – You are required to watch the entire live presentation the course. If you do not watch the entire live presentation, you will have to watch the recorded version in its entirety.
- Attendance Codes – As you watch the live presentation, you will receive two attendance codes, each containing three alphanumeric characters. Save these codes. You will need to enter the full six-character attendance code prior to accessing the final quiz.
- Purchase CE Course
- If the course is approved by NASAA for IAR CE and you purchased this webinar on an a la carte basis, you will then need to request a course discount code from RCC to utilize at https://www.CE4Advisers.com .
- If you are attending this course as part of an Annual Compliance Program package of RCC, you will need to purchase the IAR CE Course at https://www.CE4Advisers.com or use a course discount code provided under your firm’s Annual Compliance Program package. Please note that note only certain ACP packages include course discount codes.
- IAR Acknowledgement – Sign the IAR CE Acknowledgement & Attestation.
- Final Quiz (Recorded Course Only) – You must complete each lesson and receive a score of 70% on the final quiz to receive IAR CE credit (assuming the course has been approved by NASAA). You are only allowed three attempts on the final quiz.
- Survey. You have to answer a survey on the course and instructor.
NASAA Disclaimer
NASAA does not endorse any particular provider of CE courses. The content of the course and any views expressed are our own and do not necessarily reflect the views of NASAA or any of its member jurisdictions.
Important Disclosures
Please carefully review the following disclosures and limitations of this course.
- Although the sponsor of this course, RIA Compliance Consultants, Inc. (“Sponsor”), is an affiliate of a law firm and Sponsor may have an individual on its staff that is also licensed as an attorney providing legal services in a completely separate capacity, Sponsor is not a law firm and does not provide legal services or legal advice. A consulting relationship with Sponsor does not provide the same protections as an attorney-client relationship.
- This course is offered for educational purposes only and should not be considered an engagement with the course instructor or Sponsor. This presentation should not be considered a comprehensive review or analysis of the topics discussed today. To these educational materials are not a substitute for consulting with an attorney or compliance consultant in a one-on-one context whereby all the facts of your situation can be considered in their entirety.
- Information provided during this course is provided “as is” without warranty of any kind, either express or implied, including, without limitation, warranties and merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, or non-infringement. The course instructor and Sponsor assume no liability or responsibility for any errors or omissions in the content of the presentation.
- To the extent that this course description or the course itself includes reference to a pending enforcement action or a consent order, please understand that the course instructor and Sponsor have not not verified the accuracy of the securities regulator’s complaint, order or other statements, and the course instructor and Sponsor are not offering any opinion whether the allegations made by the securities regulator in such enforcement action are accurate.
- The course instructor and Sponsor are not be under an obligation to advise you of any regulatory developments or subsequent changes to educational material presented in this course.
- There is no guarantee or promise that concepts, opinions and/or best practices discussed in this course will be favorably received by a regulator or result in a certain outcome in adversarial proceeding.
- Communication with the course instructor is not protected from discovery by third-parties during litigation or regulatory proceedings. Please keep questions during this course in a hypothetical form.
- Reviewing the slides and/or attending this course does not create a consulting engagement with RIA Compliance Consultants, Inc.
