WrenfieldEstate Law
Downtown Los Angeles seen from a public plaza, towers and palms behind a flight of steps.

Founder

Daniel Wrenfield

Trust design and family governance  ·  Santa Monica, California

A man with gray hair and a short gray beard, in glasses and a charcoal three piece suit with a dark tie, one hand in his pocket, looking toward the camera.
2007

Year of admission

California

Jurisdiction

Specialist

Certified in estate planning, trust and probate law, State Bar of California

C.D. Cal.

U.S. District Court, 2009

U.S. Tax Court

Admitted 2011

2

Languages ยท English, French

02

What Daniel does for the people who call him

The work

Most people who reach Daniel have been meaning to do this for a year or more. Something finally moved it up the list, and what they want first is to be told plainly what they actually need, and what it will cost them to have it.

He designs the plan and he drafts it himself. The person who takes the first call is the person who writes the trust.

Before the firm

Daniel spent eighteen years in estate planning inside larger firms, where he learned how plans fail: not at the drafting, which is the easy part, but in the years afterwards when nobody retitles the house or tells the successor trustee where anything is.

He opened the firm to do the same work with fewer layers between a family and the person reading their file.

How he works

He runs the family meeting himself, and he runs it before the documents are signed rather than after. Adult children hear the reasoning from the person who wrote it, which is the difference between a plan that is followed and one that is argued about.

Clients are told what a matter will cost before it begins, and told again when something changes that number.

Away from the practice

Daniel grew up in Santa Monica and has never managed to leave. He swims most mornings, keeps a garden that is more ambitious than it is successful, and reads more history than is strictly good for him.

03

Education, admissions, associations and recognition

Education
UCLA School of Law

Juris Doctor

2007
University of California, Berkeley

Bachelor of Arts, History

2003
Admissions and courts
State Bar of California

Attorney and Counselor at Law

2007
U.S. District Court, Central District of California

General Bar

2009
United States Tax Court

Bar of the Court

2011
Associations
State Bar of California

Trusts and Estates Section

2008
Los Angeles County Bar Association

Member, Trusts and Estates Section

2008
Santa Monica Bar Association

Member

2012
Recognition
State Bar of California

Certified Specialist, Estate Planning, Trust and Probate Law

2013

Source: State Bar of California, Board of Legal Specialization

Los Angeles County Bar Association

Contributing author, trust administration handbook

2019

Source: Los Angeles County Bar Association, 2019

05

What this costs and how long it takes

Daniel quotes a fee in writing before any work begins, and the figure does not change without a conversation first. Most matters fall into one of three shapes.

A plan

A trust, a pour-over will, the directives, and the transfers that actually put your assets inside the trust.

Fee basis
Flat fee, quoted after the first conversation.
Typical time
Three to six weeks, most of which is you deciding, not us drafting.

A revision

An amendment or a full restatement of a plan that already exists, and a review of what it is holding.

Fee basis
Flat fee.
Typical time
Two to four weeks from the day the old documents arrive.

An administration

What happens after. Notices, valuations, transfers and the accounting a successor trustee is required to produce.

Fee basis
Hourly, with a written estimate for each phase and a new one before any phase begins.
Typical time
Nine to eighteen months for a straightforward trust, longer where real property or a business is involved.

Anyone who gives you a firm number for an administration at the first call is guessing.

What moves a matter up a band: property in more than one state, a business with other owners, a beneficiary who has already retained someone, and a document nobody can find.

06

Who he is not the right lawyer for

Daniel takes estate planning and trust administration, and a limited number of matters at a time. Some things he will not take, and he says so on the first call rather than the third.

  • Contested trust litigation.

    Where a plan is already being fought over in court, that is its own practice. He refers those out, by name, and stays available to the family as the person who wrote the plan.

  • A plan you want drafted without a conversation.

    If the instruction is to produce documents from a form and not ask questions, the documents will be worse than the ones you can buy online, and cost more.

  • Anything whose purpose is to defeat a creditor already at the door.

    Planning done in front of a known claim is not planning. He will tell you that on the first call.

  • Matters below roughly the cost of doing them properly.

    If a small estate needs nothing more than a will and a beneficiary designation, he will tell you that and tell you where to get it.

07

Written by Daniel

A trust that owns nothing does nothing.

The document is the easy half

People arrive believing the hard part of an estate plan is the drafting. It is not. The drafting is the part with the most pages and the least risk.

A revocable living trust is a set of instructions attached to a container. Signing it creates the container. It does not put anything in it, and nothing about the signing ceremony suggests that a step is missing.

What funding actually means

Funding is the work of retitling what you own so the trust owns it. The house needs a new deed recorded with the county. The accounts need the trust named as owner, not as beneficiary, unless there is a reason to do otherwise. The business interest needs an assignment that the operating agreement actually permits.

Each of those is a separate act with a separate piece of paper, and each of them can be quietly skipped without anything appearing to go wrong for twenty years.

What an unfunded trust costs the family

An asset the trust does not own goes through probate, which is the exact thing the trust was bought to avoid. In California that is a public proceeding, on a statutory fee schedule, and it commonly runs a year or more.

The cruelty of it is the timing. Nobody discovers the omission while it can still be fixed in an afternoon. They discover it in the month after a death, when the person who could have signed the deed is the person who has died.

What to ask whoever drafted yours

Ask for the list of what the trust owns. Not the schedule attached to the back of the document, which is a wish. The recorded deed, the account statements showing the trust as owner, the assignment for the business interest.

If nobody can produce that list, the plan is a document rather than a plan, and that is a fixable problem right up until it is not.

08

Selected matters

01
Founder, two-generation family manufacturer
Los Angeles County · 2024
Arrived with
A trust drafted in 2009, a company sold and repurchased since, and an operating agreement that forbade the transfer the trust assumed had happened.
At stake
Whether the founder's shares were inside the trust at all, and what a triggering event would do to the other owners.
What Daniel did
Restated the trust, negotiated an amendment to the operating agreement with the other owners' counsel, and recorded the transfers.
02
Couple, second marriage, children on both sides
Santa Monica · 2023
Arrived with
Two plans written for two earlier lives, each naming a former spouse, and a jointly owned home neither plan mentioned.
At stake
Whether the survivor could stay in the house, and whether four adult children would read the outcome as a decision or as an accident.
What Daniel did
Drafted mirror trusts with a survivor's occupancy provision, and ran the family meeting before signature rather than after.
03
Widow, estate with property in two states
Probate avoided · 2022
Arrived with
A funded California trust, and a cabin in Oregon that had never been retitled.
At stake
An ancillary probate in a second state for a single asset, and the delay that would impose on the whole administration.
What Daniel did
Established the small-estate route available in Oregon for the cabin and completed the California administration without opening a second proceeding.

Matters are described in general terms. Prior results do not guarantee a similar outcome.

09

What counsel say

He told my client at the first meeting that half of what she had been sold by her last firm was unnecessary. She retained him that afternoon.
Marguerite Oyelaran Partner, Corporate Halstead Reyes LLP, Los Angeles Referring counsel to Daniel Wrenfield since 2016
I have been on the other side of two administrations Daniel ran. He produces the accounting before anyone asks for it, which is rarer than it should be.
Douglas Ferrante Senior Counsel, Trusts and Estates Brennan Meade Delacroix, San Francisco Opposing counsel in 2021 and 2024
10

What happens after you write

  1. You write. I read it myself the day it arrives.
  2. We speak within one business day. Thirty minutes, by phone, no charge.
  3. If I am the right person for the matter, you receive a written scope and a fee before any work begins. If I am not, I tell you who is.

Fees are quoted in writing before work begins. You will not receive an invoice for a figure you have not already seen.

I handle the matter. Where it needs a second set of hands, you are told who, and before they touch it.

Write to Daniel

Trust design and family governance, from the Santa Monica office. There is no cost for the first conversation.

Book a consultation All four attorneys