Who actually helps with all the stuff outside of probate?
My family is dealing with an estate right now and one thing I didn’t really understand going into it was how much sits outside the actual probate/legal process. The lawyer can handle the court side, but then there’s figuring out what accounts exist, tracking down assets, dealing with the house, banks, bills, taxes, subscriptions, beneficiaries, etc. It starts feeling less like one legal process and more like managing a bunch of separate projects at once. Asset discovery is probably the part I’m most curious about. For people who have actually gone through this, how did you make sure you’d found everything? Did your probate lawyer help with that side too, did you bring in a CPA or another professional, or did most of it still fall on you as executor? And if you used some kind of full-service estate settlement company to coordinate everything, was that actually useful compared with hiring the different professionals separately?