Brooke Didier Starks
Brooke Didier Starks is an estate planning attorney with more than 20 years of experience helping midwest families with wills and trusts, wealth preservation, farm and business succession planning, and probate and estate administration.
Price range
- $6,500 - $7,500
Expert
- Succession Planning
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About
Brooke Starks’ lawyer life finds her discussing death, taxes, and difficult family dynamics daily, which could sound depressing if you don’t also know how rewarding it is to be invited into the living room of people’s lives. She owns and operates Legacy Legal, a boutique estate planning firm that caters to farm families and entrepreneurs. Having grown up in rural Illinois, Brooke leans on her small-town roots, humor, and down-to-earth style to complement her decades of legal expertise and connect with audiences. One of her most treasured compliments is “no one ever explained it like that before.” She strives to break down hard topics into bite-size pieces and find solutions to situations that families think are impossible. Brooke lives in rural Illinois with her husband and two teens. She is the co-founder of 5 Things, LLC a company that facilitates networking events for professional women. She volunteers regularly with United Way and her local church. She works so she can take cool vacations. For fun, she likes jogging, winning at board games, trying her hand at cooking (but not cleaning), and visiting places she’s never been.
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Video Clips
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Topics
You’re Doing it Wrong: Resolving Generational Differences on the Farm
The workplace is changing and technology is expediting it. Farm families have multiple generations working side-by-side, often with vastly different ideas about what and how work should get done. Differences arise, tempers flare and conflict ensues. This 60-90 minute segment walks through economic and historical events that shaped the generations that are working on the farm today (and the ghosts of family farmers past), asking attendees to examine the sources of their own values and shed light on the sources of the values of those they work alongside. This segment shares research on generational differences alongside real-world anecdotes that leave audiences thinking “I’m glad we’re not the only ones.”
And They All Came to Thanksgiving Dinner: Setting Family Farms Up For Success
Many farm families are operating multimillion-dollar operations, but they are not running them that way. This 90-120 minute segment can be used to highlight best practices for choosing fiduciaries (executors, trustees, other decision-makers), communicating intentions, and sharing plans among farm families, or it can be used to highlight a framework for conducting family business meetings. The goal in the end is that the family unit survives and they all still want to come to Thanksgiving dinner (but that we don’t conduct the family business meeting there).
Cut the Jargon: Estate Planning Legalese Explained
Legal jargon is frustrating and one of the big obstacles to moving forward with estate planning. Even professionals like lenders, accountants, and investment advisors sometimes struggle with the technical terms and inadvertently lead their customers astray. This 90-minute piece teaches the terminology for proper titling of real estate, ownership of assets, selection of fiduciaries (key role players in an estate plan), and tax terms that lead to confusion. A great baseline course for those who’ve never heard these words or a refresher for those that encounter them during the workday.
Get Out of Your Own Way: Building a Legacy That Lasts Longer Than You Do
Building a true legacy means creating a plan for generations that you may never even meet. Farm clients often plan for their spouses and kids and even to save a little taxes, but real legacy transcends the here and now for lasting impact on the farm and into the generations of the future. The hardest part is laying the framework and then moving out of the way to let it flourish. This 60-120 minute segment can visit the foundational steps of creating an estate plan all the way through the laying of a business succession plan with a focus on the transition of intent, impact, and institutional knowledge from one generation to the future.