Thomas-Walters, PLLC

Focus and practice areas

Thomas-Walters, PLLC handles estate planning, and the site states that its attorneys work in that field alone. The Fort Worth office covers wills, trusts, probate and deeds. Clients come from Texas and from other states.

The trust work is where the detail sits. The firm names revocable living trusts, Medicaid asset protection trusts, special needs trusts, irrevocable life insurance trusts, pet trusts, testamentary trusts and IRA trusts. Each of those does a different job, and a client usually needs one or two, seldom all.

Alongside the trusts, the firm prepares last wills and testaments and works on asset protection, business succession and estate tax planning. It also drafts disability documents: medical and financial powers of attorney, declarations of guardian and living wills. Those are the papers that decide who speaks for a person who can no longer speak for themselves.

Where estate planning meets elder law

The firm's own material points to an overlap with elder law, and in particular Medicaid asset protection and nursing home planning. In my opinion that overlap explains a good deal about how the practice is shaped.

Medicaid long-term care rules in Texas apply a look-back period to asset transfers. Gifts and transfers made within that window can delay eligibility, which is why planning tools of this kind get drafted years ahead of any nursing home admission. A Medicaid asset protection trust is one response to that timing problem.

Special needs trusts answer a related question. A beneficiary receiving means-tested benefits can lose them if money arrives in their own name, so the trust holds the funds and pays for things the benefit programme doesn't cover. Drafting one correctly matters more than drafting one quickly.

How the team is built

Leslie Thomas owns Thomas-Walters, PLLC and is the principal estate planning lawyer in the Fort Worth office. She signs as Partner and Attorney on the firm's contact page. She has written on estate planning and elder law.

The firm's contact page puts the attorneys' combined experience at 100 years. The site describes work helping families customise plans around their own goals and around life transitions: the sort of change that prompts someone to revisit a will in the first place.

Beyond Leslie Thomas, the site names no other attorneys and publishes no individual biographies. As a reviewer, I'd note that the 100 year figure implies a bench wider than one lawyer, though the website leaves that bench unnamed.

A multi-state footprint

Thomas-Walters lists offices in Cape Cod, Georgia, Missouri, Tennessee and Texas, and calls itself a multi-state firm. Fort Worth holds the main office.

That spread has a practical use in this field. Estate law is state law, and the rules diverge on points that matter: how a will must be witnessed, whether a spouse can be disinherited, what a probate court requires before it will release property. A family with a house in Tennessee and a retirement account managed from Texas runs into two sets of rules at once.

Real property is the clearest example. Land is governed by the law of the state where it sits, so a Texas resident who owns a cottage on Cape Cod may face a second, separate probate in Massachusetts. Firms admitted in more than one state can address both files together. Deeds appear on the Thomas-Walters services list, and deed work is often how out-of-state property gets moved into a trust to avoid that second proceeding.

How the firm charges and stays in touch

Fees are flat, and the site says the firm doesn't bill hourly. A client knows the cost of a plan before the drafting starts.

Flat pricing suits this kind of work. Estate planning is largely a defined project: a set of documents, a few meetings, a signing. Hourly billing tends to discourage the follow-up phone call, and follow-up calls are exactly what an estate plan needs when circumstances shift.

The firm runs a programme it calls Lawyer for Life, which gives past clients continued access at no extra charge. In my opinion that is the more interesting item on the fee page. Estate plans decay quietly. A trust drafted in 2015 may name a trustee who has since died, reference a bank account that was closed, or rest on tax thresholds that have moved.

A free 15 minute consultation is offered to people making first contact. Fifteen minutes is enough time to establish whether a matter needs a will, a trust or a probate filing.

What a client can expect the work to involve

Planning documents

A standard estate plan built around a revocable living trust involves several moving parts. The trust document itself, a pour-over will to catch anything left outside it, deeds transferring real property into the trust, and beneficiary designations updated on retirement accounts and life insurance. Missing the funding step is the classic error: a trust with nothing in it controls nothing.

Powers of attorney and declarations of guardian work on a different timeline. They apply while the client is alive but unable to act, and Texas has statutory forms with specific execution requirements. Living wills, known in Texas as directives to physicians, record a person's wishes about life-sustaining treatment.

Probate

Probate takes the plan into court after a death. Texas offers an independent administration route that keeps court supervision light where the will authorises it, which shortens the process considerably. Where no will exists, the court applies the intestacy statute, and the heirs may need to be established through a separate proceeding before anything can be distributed.

Business succession sits in its own category. Transferring an interest in a closely held company involves the operating agreement or shareholder agreement as much as the will, and those documents can override an estate plan if nobody reads them side by side.

What the record shows

The picture the website gives is of a firm with a narrow subject and a wide geography. One field, practised across five listed locations, under an owner who writes about it.

The site publishes no founding year and no bar admission dates. Practice area detail is the strongest part of the public material, with named trust types and named disability documents rather than general headings.

For a family weighing a will against a trust, or facing a nursing home admission with assets to consider, the flat fee and the free first call make the cost of asking a question clear at the outset. Leslie Thomas is the named attorney in Fort Worth.