Your household has paid four professionals. An estate attorney. An accountant. An insurance agent. A financial advisor. 

Each of these professionals are competent in their own capacity. However, where this insight adds value is identifying the gap between them, and none are watching the whole structure.

Some of the first thoughts that come to mind are that the professionals completed the task they were hired for and did not consider the broadening direction of their client’s situation.

I make this claim based on the evidence that sits within four documents that probably deserves a reread. 

Your financial advisor, CPA, and attorney are not a team, because nobody hired them as one

As I was preparing to write this insight I searched the web for answers, and most of the answers land on the same instructions, and in some of my content I am guilty of this as well. “Your professionals should coordinate with each other on your behalf.” 

This advice is well intended, and if this does not happen it’s assumed that all professionals will communicate thoroughly, and not based on an introduction being missed. 

But in truth what actually happens is less obvious. You hired four specialists to perform four defined tasks. 

Each performed the task and stopped where the agreement said to stop.

The attorney was engaged to create the documents, not to maintain them

You hired the estate attorney, to draft the trust, prepare the will, execute the powers of attorney, and retitle the deed. Correctly done, and the work is finished and the engagement closes.

Then your life keeps moving. A rental property gets purchased. A business sells. A child marries. A parent dies and an inheritance arrives. 

Each of those events has the potential to change what the estate attorney documents describe, and the attorney who wrote them by agreement is no longer a part of the process. 

Under ABA Model Rule 1.2(c), a lawyer may limit the scope of a representation with the client’s informed consent, and limited scope is the normal shape of estate work. The boundary was disclosed at the start and agreed to on the first page of the written engagement.

Not to forget to mention. Attorney-client privilege protects confidential communication, and bringing a non-attorney into that conversation can waive the protection. 

The privilege belongs to you rather than to the lawyer, so the caution you may read as territorial is closer to an obligation. In my experience, firms that do coordinate often ask clients to sign a third-party waiver first. 

Whether a given conversation stays protected is a question for your counsel. And I want to make sure this is clear, none of this is a criticism of estate attorneys. 

Maintenance was assigned to you, and the transactions that break an estate plan rarely announce themselves as estate planning events.

The accountant was engaged to file the return, not to plan the year

Here is a pattern I see constantly. A household works with an accountant, receives a completed return, pays the tax bill, and moves on. 

Nobody in that exchange asks how this year supports the overall financial goals. The household has no way to judge if the taxes paid is just default or were there areas that should have been considered but were not utilized, as compared to the overall financial plan and goals. 

And granted this falls outside of what the accountant agreed to do. Filing taxes looks backward at a year already closed. 

Planning looks forward to a year still developing. Then there is a tougher constraint on the part of the accountant, that restricts what can be discussed about the clients tax situation.

Under Internal Revenue Code Section 7216, a tax return preparer is required to receive written consent to disclose tax return information for any purposes beyond preparing your tax return.

Read that again with your own advisors in mind. The reason your accountant has never called your financial advisor may be this constraint, holding them back.

The agent was engaged to buy the coverage you asked for

In most states, an insurance agent owes a duty to procure the coverage requested and no duty to advise on whether the coverage is adequate, absent a special relationship. Courts have held that asking for full coverage does not expand that duty, and a Texas federal court reaffirmed the principle in 2025.

So the policy renews and in some cases increases at a class rate, but based on what limit you chose years ago, against a balance sheet that has since increased. 

Who is required to mention this gap? If you have not compared your umbrella limit against your current net worth, the comparison is yours to make.

Four complete engagements, and four boundaries drawn by rule

Set the four boundaries side by side and a pattern appears that none of the professionals see on their own within their silos. The attorney stops at execution, because scope is limited by agreement and privilege discourages the phone call. 

The accountant stops at filing, because a criminal statute governs disclosure. The agent stops at procurement, because the duty to advise was never owed. 

The advisor sees the accounts and rarely sees the deed, the policy declarations, or the trust.

You are the only party who sees all four corners. You are the only party who can open the doors, since the consent, the waiver, and the scope all belong to you. 

And this is the case for many that are reading this; you are the only party in the arrangement with no professional training in any of the four disciplines.

A team of professionals without a coordinator is not a team. The households living this are not disengaged. 

In the 2024 Bank of America Private Bank Study of Wealthy Americans, a survey of more than a thousand people holding at least $3 million in investable assets, 97 percent reported satisfaction with their advisor relationship overall. One dimension scored lowest of everything measured: communication with their other advisors, at 79 percent, where fewer than half gave the top rating. 

My own read, offered as opinion rather than finding, is that the number is generous. A household cannot rate coordination they were never positioned to observe.

Built but not protected is the name for this condition, and a structure holds at the weakest dimension rather than the average of four.

An example of where a CPA and advisor never spoke, and what that was worth

A business owner I work with was told by her accountant, correctly, that contributing to a retirement plan would reduce her tax bill. Good advice, and complete advice inside a tax filing engagement. 

Which plan, and how the plan should be built, sat outside that engagement.

She was planning a 401(k) with a 10 percent contribution to every eligible employee. On compensation of $350,000, her own share came to $35,000.

We looked at a SEP instead, built on permitted disparity, a formula that accounts for Social Security. In 2025 the formula added 5.7 percent on compensation above that year’s Social Security wage base of $176,100. For her, an additional $9,912 moved into her own tax-deferred account, for a total of $44,912. Employees earning below the wage base received nothing extra, so those added dollars cost the business nothing beyond her own contribution.

Permitted disparity is authorized by statute and unavailable on the IRS model form most SEPs use, so the plan document has to be chosen deliberately. And the accountant was right the whole time. 

Her recommendation was sound, and the recommendation stopped at the edge of the work she was hired to do.

Read the four engagement letters this week

One action, and you can complete the action alone, today, without a single phone call.

Pull the engagement letter or service agreement from each professional you pay. Read what each one says the professional agreed to do. 

Not what you assumed. But what the document says.

You will find four narrow, accurate descriptions of four completed jobs, and the space between them. Three pieces of paper open the channels after that: a Section 7216 consent for your accountant, and written authorizations with your attorney and your advisor. 

Each requires you to ask.

Now It’s Your Turn

Now that you have reviewed each engagement letter and agreement, and you confirmed you received what was agreed upon, it’s time to determine the gaps and where updates are needed.  

This is where we move beyond simple planning to intentional wealth that’s created by design. 

Key takeaways

I am not your investment advisor. I am the coordination point for the risks investments cannot fix.

If you pay four professionals and none of them has seen the whole picture, that conversation is worth one hour. Book a conversation when you are ready.

The Wealth at Risk structure audit scores all four dimensions, coordination included, across the full series.

Citations:
The 2025 Texas holding on duty to advise is Century Surety Co. v. EC & SM Guerra, LLC, W.D. Tex., August 2025.