On October 12–14, IMS is bringing estate planning and elder law firm owners to the Drury Plaza Hotel in Colorado Springs for three working days we’re calling The Great Shake-Out. It’s the inaugural IMS Estate Planning & Elder Law Growth Summit, and registration is open now at EstatePlanningReset.com. Early-bird pricing is $995 per person through September 14, and seating is limited.
Here’s why we built it.
I’ve watched firms survive recessions. I’ve watched Google rewrite search more than once, watched social media arrive, watched seminars lose their economics and direct mail lose its returns, and watched websites move from novelty to the center of client acquisition. Every one of those shifts mattered, and firms adapted to every one of them. None of them compares to what’s happening right now.
The Estate Planning Reset™ isn’t a forecast. It’s already underway, and the signs are easy to miss precisely because none of them arrives as a crisis. Referrals slow down without anyone announcing it. Prospects show up having already asked ChatGPT what a revocable trust does and whether they need one. Financial advisors start offering estate planning themselves. Website traffic softens at firms that changed nothing about their websites. Clients shop longer, ask harder questions, and expect more before they’ll book.
What makes this so difficult to act on is that nothing feels catastrophic. The calendar still fills. The phone still rings. It’s just doing it a little less often than it used to, and a little less often is easy to explain away for about eighteen months. That’s how a shake-out actually works — not with an explosion, but with erosion you can rationalize until you can’t.
What we’ve been watching
IMS works exclusively with estate planning and elder law firms, which gives us a narrow view of the world and an unusually deep one. We see hundreds of firms, thousands of campaigns, and millions of search impressions, and that volume lets us recognize a pattern well before it becomes an industry headline.
Two things happened at once over the past two years, and the difference between them is the whole story.
Our own clients largely held their ground. Their traffic didn’t collapse, because years of accumulated content and trust signals kept them visible and kept them credible even as the rules underneath search changed. That’s not luck, and it’s not a sales pitch — it’s what the data showed us.
What we didn’t expect were the calls from firms we’d never worked with. Firms with good reputations and long histories, watching their traffic fall off a cliff, their referral pipelines thin out, and their consultation calendars go quiet. They weren’t calling because they wanted better marketing. They were calling because they were frightened, and because nothing they’d done for twenty years was producing the results it used to produce.
That gap — between the firms holding steady and the firms in free fall — became the foundation of our industry report, The Estate Planning Reset. It also convinced me that a report wasn’t enough.
What we’re doing in October
Three days, three domains, and no imported motivational speaker whose material has nothing to do with your firm. We’re going to work.
Monday is client acquisition. How prospective clients actually find you now, what answer engines are doing to visibility, why referral pipelines are thinning across the board, and what it costs you when the economics of your acquisition model quietly force you to sell from pressure.
Tuesday is intake and conversion. What happens after the phone rings, and where firms lose revenue they already paid to generate. James Campbell runs the full day.
Wednesday is operations. How to build a firm that grows without depending on heroic effort from the owner — and how to tell which of your three domains deserves your attention first.
You’ll leave Wednesday at noon with three completed scorecards, one prioritized roadmap, and a clear answer to the question most firm owners can’t answer honestly about their own practice: what’s the single constraint holding this firm back right now?
Why this one is personal
This summit didn’t start in a planning meeting. It started with a year away.
I spent that year in treatment for breast cancer, and while I was gone the marketplace moved faster than I would have believed possible. Coming back to it was like coming back to a city after a flood — the streets are where you left them, but nothing else is.
I’ll be honest about my own part in it. I wasn’t studying the market from a distance and issuing warnings. I got rebuilt by force, and then I came back and found the industry I’ve served since 1995 in the middle of the same kind of reordering. That experience is why I’m not willing to hand you a slide deck and wish you luck.
Who should come
If you’ve been wondering why referrals aren’t as dependable as they were, whether AI is changing what clients expect before they ever reach you, why prospects seem more skeptical than they used to be, or whether your website is quietly aging out from under you — this was built for you.
If what you want is a comfortable conference where you sit, listen, collect a few credits, and go home unchanged, I’d tell you honestly that this isn’t it. You’ll be working, and you’ll be working on your own firm along with other people who are doing the same.
The firms that come out of the next five years strongest won’t be the oldest or the biggest. They’ll be the ones that recognized the market had changed and adjusted while they still had the room to do it deliberately.
The Estate Planning Reset is already here. I’d like your firm to be one of the ones that benefits from it.
Join us October 12–14 in Colorado Springs. Register at EstatePlanningReset.com — $995 per person through September 14. Estateplanningreset.com
