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You don't need to know what estate planning you need before you contact us
Most people know they need to get their Will and estate planning sorted, but aren't quite sure where to start.
You don't need to know what documents you need, whether a Testamentary Trust is right for you, or have all of your decisions made before you speak with us.
Leave the particulars to us to help you finesse.
We'll make sure that we understand you, your family, your assets and what you want to achieve. Then, we will explain the things that matter, and help you put the right estate plan in place.
A good estate plan is more than a Will
Your Will is important, but it is only one part of your estate planning.
We also need to think about who can make financial and personal decisions for you if you cannot make them yourself, what happens to your superannuation and life insurance, how your assets are owned, and how the arrangements you put in place will actually work for the people you love that you leave behind.
Depending on your circumstances, your estate plan may include your Will or Testamentary Trust Will, Powers of Attorney, guardianship or medical decision-making documents, superannuation death benefit nominations and Letters of Wishes.
That's the heart in Head and Heart Estate Planning. We will never look at any one part of your estate planning in isolation. We need to make sure the whole plan works together — and that it will work in real life, when you actually need it.
What kind of estate planning do I need?
You don't need to know the answer to this before you contact us.
Part of our job is to understand your circumstances, identify the things that matter, and recommend a strategy with the right level of estate planning for you.
Broadly, the estate planning we do falls into three categories.
Straightforward Estate Planning
For individuals and couples with relatively straightforward family and financial circumstances who want to put comprehensive estate planning in place.
This will generally include:
a Basic Will
Enduring Powers of Attorney
Guardianship or Medical Decision-Making documents
advice about your superannuation.
Singles from $2,200
Couples from $3,000
See our Pricing →
Testamentary Trust Estate Planning
A Testamentary Trust (TT) can only be established by a Will and is only activated after your death. A TT can provide significant asset protection and tax advantages, while giving your beneficiaries greater flexibility in how their inheritance is managed.
We will listen to what's important to you and help you decide whether including a Testamentary Trust in your Will will be valuable for the people you love tomorrow.
If it is, we will customise it to each of your family members’ unique needs and strengths, so that it reflects your wishes, works for the people you love and protects them without ruling from the grave.
Singles from $4,200
Couples from $4,750
LEARN MORE ABOUT TESTAMENTARY TRUSTS PAGE COMING SOON→
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More Complex Circumstances
Sometimes the complexity of your estate planning isn't about the type of Will you need.
And sometimes what you want is actually very simple, but the best way to achieve it requires some thoughtful planning balancing competing needs and priorities.
Blended families, family trusts, SMSFs, business interests, family loans, providing someone with a right to live in a property, concerns about your estate being challenged, or other particular circumstances affecting someone you love can all mean there is more to consider.
We will take the time to understand what you want to achieve, identify the things that matter, and design an estate plan that works in your circumstances.
Where additional advice or drafting is required, we'll explain why and confirm the cost with you before we proceed.
Not sure which one sounds like you? You don't need to be.
Part of our job is to understand your circumstances and recommend the estate planning approach that's right for you, so don't feel like you need to have it all figured out before you book the call.
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Why Head and Heart Estate Planning?
We care about getting this right. Because we know you love the people in your Will as much as we love the people in ours.
Head and Heart Estate Planning was founded by Lucy Percy around a fairly simple truth: excellent estate planning needs both.
It needs the head: technical expertise, careful strategy, excellent drafting and the ability to anticipate what might happen years from now.
Experience matters here too. After preparing hundreds of estate plans, years of advising families, being the face of the estate plan for grieving family post-death, and continually reviewing the cases that show us what can happen when plans are eventually tested, we recognise patterns. We can often see where a decision might lead, what could go wrong and which questions are worth asking before a problem exists.
It also needs the heart: kindness, patience, generosity with our time and knowledge, and a genuine understanding that the decisions we're helping you make are about the people you love.
And kindness doesn't always mean making decisions that will make everyone happy. Sometimes good estate planning requires a decision that may ultimately disappoint or even hurt someone you love. When it does, we will help you stress-test the different ways it could be done and find a way to carry out your wishes with as much thoughtfulness and kindness as the circumstances allow.
That combination has shaped the way Head and Heart has operated for the past eight years, drawing on Lucy's 14 years of experience as a lawyer.
We are generous with our knowledge
You don't need to know the right questions to ask us.
Part of being a good estate planning lawyer is knowing the questions you haven't asked, the options you don't know exist and the issues you couldn't reasonably be expected to identify yourself.
We don't hold that knowledge back. We'll tell you what we think, explain why, show you the alternatives and give you the benefit of our experience.
Sometimes that leads to sophisticated planning. Sometimes our advice is that you can safely keep things simple.
Either way, you'll know why.
We understand that this is personal
Estate planning is technical legal work, but the decisions and results themselves are deeply human.
They involve marriages, children, siblings, ageing parents, second relationships, family businesses, people who are wonderful with children but terrible with money, people you love enormously but wouldn't appoint as your executor, and sometimes relationships that are difficult to explain in a questionnaire but we can talk through and have a laugh.
We make room for all of that.
Your family or your wishes don’t need to fit neatly into a legal template and you still deserve an excellent plan.
We think before we draft
Our precedents and systems are excellent, but they don't dictate the advice we give you.
We start with your family, your assets, the people you trust, what worries you and what you actually want to achieve. Then we work out the strategy.
The best estate planning advice often comes from identifying an option you didn't know was available, or asking a question you hadn't thought to ask, even when the answer means your estate plan no longer fits neatly within our precedents and templates.
The strategy comes first. The documents follow. Not the other way around.
We make complicated things easier to understand
Lucy has always believed that if a lawyer truly understands something, they should be able to explain it clearly.
So we use plain English, stories, visual diagrams and real-life examples to help you understand not just what your options are, but how those choices could actually play out for the people you love.
We don't want you agreeing with us simply because we're the lawyers in the room and it’s our 100th time reading the Testamentary Trust and it’s your first!
We want you to understand enough to make genuinely informed decisions of your own.
We think about the people who aren't in the room
One day, the estate plan we create together may be picked up by your spouse, your children, an Attorney, an Executor or someone else you love. Perhaps on one of the hardest days of their life.
We think about them while we're planning with you.
Will they understand what you intended? Have we made sensible and enough contingencies? Have we given the people you've appointed enough guidance? Will the structures we've created help them, or unnecessarily constrain them?
The real measure of a good estate plan isn't how impressive it looks when we sign it. It's how well it works for the people you love when you're no longer there to explain it.
We genuinely care about your experience along the way
We know estate planning can sit on a to-do list for years.
So we've thought carefully about how to make the process feel manageable: what information we ask you for and when, how much time we allow, how we explain difficult concepts, how we annotate your drafts, how we organise signing and even how we help you keep your plan current afterwards.
Those details aren't accidental.
We want you to feel looked after while you're doing your estate planning, and to know that the people you love have been looked after in the planning too.
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Meet the team
The Head and Heart approach, with the right lawyer for you.
Head and Heart Estate Planning was founded by Principal Lawyer Lucy Percy, who has spent the past eight years developing the firm's approach to estate planning. From the legal strategies and drafting through to the diagrams, resources and processes we use to make estate planning easier to understand.
Lucy is now joined by Dijana Baljak, a lawyer who works with Head and Heart clients on estate planning matters using that same approach, with Lucy's support and oversight.
Lucy Percy — Principal Lawyer & Founder
Lucy has been a lawyer for 14 years and has chosen to focus her practice on estate planning and wills and estates.
She loves the strategy involved in good estate planning: understanding a family, recognising the issues that matter, explaining options clearly and finding a solution that is technically excellent without being unnecessarily complicated.
Lucy is also a wife and mum of three, and much of the philosophy behind Head and Heart comes from understanding that estate planning isn't really about documents. It's about the people who will one day have to live with the decisions we make in them.
Dijana Baljak — Lawyer
Dijana is an Australian-qualified lawyer, admitted to the Supreme Court of Western Australia.
Her legal career began in Australia, but life and love eventually took Dijana to Serbia where she now lives.
But Dijana isn't new to Head and Heart Estate Planning.
For the past three years, she has worked alongside Lucy behind the scenes on many of the estate plans that have come through our firm. She knows our referrers, our clients, our processes, our approach to estate planning and, importantly, our drafting of documents in the HHEP style.
Now it's time for Dijana to step into a client-facing role of her own.
Dijana is in the process of obtaining her NSW practising certificate (hopefully by October 2026) and will work directly with clients on straightforward estate planning matters, supported by the Head and Heart Estate Planning processes, resources and approach she already knows so well, and supervised closely by Lucy.
Like Lucy, Dijana will work with clients remotely by video conference, something a large proportion of Head and Heart Estate Planning clients already choose to do.
And living on the other side of the world comes with one rather lovely advantage: Dijana can offer appointments outside ordinary Australian business hours. For clients juggling work, children and everything else life involves, an estate planning meeting from home in the evening might be exactly what makes finally getting it done possible.
We're incredibly excited for the next chapter; for Dijana, and for Head and Heart.
You don't need to choose.
Every new client starts with a complimentary Discovery Call with Lucy Percy.
Lucy will learn about your circumstances, what you want to achieve and any complexity she can identify. She'll then recommend the type of estate planning you need and the lawyer in our team best placed to help you, but the choice is always ultimately up to you.
You don't need to know who you want to work with before you call us. That's part of what the Discovery Call is for.