My parents sued me for the four point seven million dollars my grandmother left me, and to prove I was unstable their own attorney subpoenaed my service record and put it in front of the judge himself. He had read two pages of a hundred and forty. That is how my family found out what I do for a living.

The forms take about forty minutes. The conversation takes as long as it takes.

I have had three of those young men come back afterwards and sit down again and tell me things that had nothing to do with a will, because forty minutes across a table is longer than anybody in their family had spent asking them a direct question in years.

That is the job. It is not glamorous and it is not what people picture when they hear the word lawyer, and I have never wanted to do anything else.

I have explained the difference between a power of attorney and ownership to more people than I could count. I have explained testamentary capacity to nineteen-year-olds. I have talked more frightened young men through what happens to their money than I have done any other single thing in my adult life.

So Vernon Slaught stood in a courtroom in Marrow County and told a judge that the beneficiary was incapable of managing an estate.