The estate-planning attorney's new client is the multi-state RIA

The law firm Hargrove has hired David Haughton as vice president of engagement, and the route he took to the job is the firm's strategy in miniature. He spent the past year as Carson Group's vice president of estate planning, the year before as senior corporate counsel at Wealth.com, and six years before that at Commonwealth Financial Network, where he finished as team lead of advanced planning, per InvestmentNews. Now he joins a Kentucky law firm that rebranded from NetLaw last month, employs nearly 20 attorneys full-time, and serves clients of firms overseeing more than $400 billion in assets, according to CEO Alex Hargrove.

The advisor's book has gone national while the attorney who once anchored it stayed local. As Haughton told InvestmentNews, "Advisors' books are becoming less geographically concentrated, and so they don't have the center of influence attorney in their state or in their locality to be able to refer to as often as it used to be." A firm licensed across the states is the referral answer for that geography-free book, and Hargrove's roster reads like a mega-RIA roll call: Carson, Merit Financial Advisors, Mariner Wealth Advisors, and Wealth Enhancement all route advisors to it, Alex Hargrove says. Carson, Haughton's most recent employer, stood up a dedicated estate-planning program during his year there.

Haughton has worked inside an estate-planning software company, and Hargrove says its advisors routinely pair the firm with Wealth.com, Vanilla, or Luminary. Alex Hargrove's framing is that the tools earn their keep so long as they leave a path to a human attorney—"it's not just the advisor and the AI that are the last words," as he puts it—and he sees more firms questioning whether a pure technology answer suits every client.

That framing is a defensible bet, and it runs against the reflex that software steadily eats the professional. Estate-planning tooling has widened the funnel to the attorney, teaching advised households to expect a plan while leaving the sign-off, the license, and the malpractice tail in human hands. The financial plan, as this publication has argued, is becoming a byproduct, with the advisor's fee migrating toward judgment and liability; the estate document sits on the same slope. The retention math agrees: 68% of advised clients are open to switching, and a plan treated as a one-time event is the kind of static document that invites the exit. An attorney relationship with a recurring touch is the product Hargrove is selling its RIAs.

Hargrove will either keep the straightforward estates as the tooling improves, or watch the simple work migrate to software and keep only the complex tail. Haughton, based in Boston, is the hire aimed at the former.