Breaking Down Silos in Estate Planning: Gregory S. DuPont’s Comprehensive Approach to Legal and Financial Strategy
Since 1992, Gregory S. DuPont has built his legal career around the central principle that comprehensive, coordinated guidance matters more than isolated transactions. As the founder of DuPont Law Group, which includes Advocate Wealth Solutions and the Wealth Solutions Network, DuPont focuses on integrating estate planning, tax strategy, financial structuring, and investment considerations into a unified advisory framework.
Over the course of his practice, DuPont observed a recurring pattern. The way financial services are offered leaves families potentially working with multiple professionals, such as an attorney, a CPA, an investment advisor, and an insurance specialist. As a result, many lacked a coordinated strategy tying those disciplines together. From his perspective, the absence of alignment can expose clients to unnecessary risk, cost, and conflict, particularly during pivotal transitions such as retirement, incapacity, or generational wealth transfer.
According to DuPont, the goal is not to sell a product or draft documents in isolation, but to eliminate the gaps that often exist between professional silos. “Most advisors operate from a limited toolbox,” he explains. “If someone is investment-driven, they sell investments. If they are insurance-driven, they sell insurance. The client’s problem becomes secondary to the product.”
From his point of view, that product-driven model can leave families vulnerable, particularly those who have built wealth through decades of disciplined saving. He explains that many of his clients are not multi-generational dynasties but first-generation wealth builders whose primary assets sit in retirement accounts and closely held businesses. “When people talk about money, they sometimes forget what it represents,” DuPont says. “For my clients, it’s a lifetime of sacrifice. It’s their future security and their legacy.”
He notes that one of the cases he handled illustrated the consequences of fragmented advice. After the death of a family patriarch, changes to an estate plan triggered litigation among beneficiaries and charitable interests. According to DuPont, the absence of a cohesive advisory relationship led to missteps that ultimately cost the family more than a million dollars in fees and settlement expenses. “What happened to that family didn’t have to happen,” he says. “It came down to a lack of coordination and a lack of trust.”
In response, DuPont began reshaping his practice around what he frames as a comprehensive, relationship-based model. Rather than limiting his role to drafting documents, he expanded into financial and investment literacy, approaching wealth structures with the analytical lens of a litigator trained to identify risk. Over the past two decades, he explains that the model has evolved to include ancillary services designed to address the full spectrum of a client’s planning needs.
He believes the role of the estate planning attorney is also changing more broadly. As technology automates document preparation and artificial intelligence reshapes routine legal tasks, DuPont sees an opportunity for attorneys to reclaim a more strategic position. “If estate planning lawyers reduce themselves to the role of preparing documents, that role will disappear,” he says. “The real value is in being an independent third party who can assess the client’s assets, tax exposure, family dynamics, and goals, and then design a coordinated path forward.”
In recent years, DuPont has turned increasing attention toward education. Over the last four years, he has worked to develop training programs and systems that help other attorneys adopt a more integrated standard of care. His aim is to build a national network of estate planning lawyers aligned around this coordinated approach. “I spent two decades learning where the holes were,” he explains. “If we can leverage that experience, along with technology and better processes, other attorneys don’t have to repeat the same learning curve.”
He explains that a notable portion of upper-middle-class Americans are entering retirement, with a significant amount of wealth transitioning between generations. At the same time, he observes that many financial services firms are structured around product distribution rather than holistic planning. “The attorneys are on the front lines,” DuPont says. “They are in a position to connect with families at pivotal moments. That connection matters. It’s my view that this has left families at risk and has led me to my ‘march to a million’ mission, seeking to positively impact one million families and saving them from billions of dollars of preventable loss.”
Looking ahead, DuPont frames his mission in straightforward terms: to make comprehensive, coordinated planning the new standard for those who call themselves estate planning attorneys. He emphasizes that the objective is to ensure that clients receive advice grounded in their long-term interests. DuPont says, “If we can reduce unnecessary conflict, unnecessary cost, and unnecessary risk, then we have honored both the client’s lifetime of work and their vision for what comes next.”
