Kelly Cary Law, PA: A Florida estate attorney and fiduciary on finding millions in assets with Heirloom

Florida attorney Kelly Cary has spent years settling estates as the founding partner of her law practice. She also serves as fiduciary for many matters, where the job of finding every asset falls to her. She often starts with very little information on a decedent: no organized paperwork, no personal relationship, and sometimes a home in such poor condition that no records can be recovered.

Discovering assets can be one of the more complicated but necessary parts of probate and trust administration. A missed asset is money beneficiaries never receive. Where she is acting as fiduciary, Kelly is the one accountable for building an inventory of assets, to her clients and to the court. And because Florida statute bases fiduciary and attorney compensation on the value of the probated estate, every asset she doesn’t find is compensation she leaves on the table.

Days of paperwork, still no certainty

Before Heirloom, asset discovery meant legwork. Kelly would spend days inside a decedent's home and garage, going through every piece of paper she could find. She would pull two or three years of known bank statements and read them line by line, sift through unclaimed property databases one by one, and request IRS tax transcripts to see what a decedent had filed. On one estate, she requested transcripts six times and never received them.

Even after all of that, she wasn’t confident she found everything.

"I never, ever know if I have the life insurance, for example," she says.

Kelly aims to open and close an estate in about a year, but these lingering questions and ongoing delays sometimes made that impossible.

From one search to every estate

After being referred to Heirloom, Kelly started a search for a single estate. After seeing the results, she ran it on every open matter she had.

The searches surfaced millions of dollars in assets across several estates that she says she wouldn't have found any other way:

• A seven-figure estate no one knew about. Results on one estate pointed to the decedent's parent, who had died years earlier. That separate, unsettled estate was worth seven figures. Scanning the decedent's own bank statements would not have surfaced these findings.
• Accounts from a home with no usable records. She had another estate where no records could be recovered from the house. Using Heirloom, she found brokerage accounts at multiple institutions and a pension.
• Life insurance and unclaimed property. Some of Kelly’s recent searches found a life insurance policy on one estate and unclaimed property outside of Florida on another, including an insurer refund she had no record of.

Heirloom doesn't replace all of the legwork required for her job. But it covers items that used to take her days, and it reaches accounts that no amount of paper sorting would have found. That time adds up. Estate attorneys rarely have a shortage of work; what they’re short on is hours. Days saved on discovery mean estates close sooner: families receive what they’re owed faster, Kelly is paid quicker, and she can put those days toward the next estate.

Asked whether Heirloom would let her take on more cases, Kelly didn't hesitate: "Oh, yeah."

The new standard of care

For Kelly, the value of Heirloom isn't the time saved alone. It's knowing she has done everything she can.

"It is better to know than not to know," she says. "It completes your fiduciary duty. You've done everything you can. I think this covers your malpractice."

The same standard applies to attorneys who don’t serve as fiduciaries themselves. When a client is named executor or trustee, they’re the ones going through the house, the statements, and the databases, often with far less experience than Kelly. The attorney is the one guiding them through their duty of care, and if an asset turns up after the estate closes, they both have to reopen it and explain to the beneficiaries what was missed.

The reverse is just as true: a family that receives an asset they never knew existed remembers who found it. The cost of billable hours can pale in comparison to the value of assets attorneys discover with Heirloom.

Her advice to other attorneys

Kelly has since referred other estate attorneys to Heirloom. Her advice is simple: "It's so worth the money. Just do it."

And on Heirloom itself:

"It's everything I want it to be. Actually, it's more than I thought it would be, and it keeps getting better."

See what Heirloom finds on your next estate. Book a demo.

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