8 fun gifts for wills and estates lawyers

It's gift-giving season and I know you're desperate to find just the right thing to give that wills and estates lawyer you love so much. I've found some goodies that are so great, your lawyer might give you a deal on your next codicil!


1.  Estate Planning Failures of the Rich and Famous poster. There are actually five in the series so you might be able to cover off a future birthday or two as well if you buy them all. Each poster contains nine lesson-invoking nuggets about celebrities, entertainers, politicians and even a royal or two whose lack of decent estate planning is just as famous as whatever they used to be famous for. Click here to go the website.

2.  Last Will and Testament Hot Sauce. Judicial Flavours makes sauces for lawyers of all stripes and heat tolerances. And if anyone can take the heat, it's a lawyer. Some of the sauces are for litigators or commercial lawyers, but this one is just for us hot-blooded wills and estates types. Click here.

3. Law School in a Box. Sure, you could spend $100,000 on a law degree from Harvard or Yale. But then you'd have to deal with crowded classrooms, inconvenient course schedules, and rigorous academic study. Fortunately, the brilliant minds of Mental_Floss magazine are proud to offer an alternative: Law School in a Box. This prestigious boxed university offers a complete legal education for just $14.95. Your program includes: • Law School in 96 Pages: Your Comprehensive Textbook • 10 Heroes of the Courtroom Trading Cards • 10 "You Be the Judge" Cards • A devilishly complicated legal trivia bar exam • A rolled diploma with real Latin words. It's the perfect gift for lawyers and would-be lawyers of all ages, from the highest-ranked boxed law school in the country! Click here.

4.  Want to show off your fancy vocabulary and beat down your fellow lawyers? Of course you do! Isn't getting a fancy vocabulary (and maybe a BMW) why you went to law school in the first place? Now here's a game that will help you out-spell and out-orate the best of 'em: Wordie Wars! Its advertising flogs it as "The Ultimate Showdown for Superior Spellers, Leaping Linguists, and Genius Grammarians!" Cool, huh? Click here to begin your domination of the word nerds.

5.  The funny and subversive 'Queen's Counsel' cartoon strip has appeared on the law pages of "The Times" since 1993, delighting the legal profession and general readers alike with its accurate and biting send-up of the profession and its practices. Here - allegedly! - is the best of them. In these pages, readers will delight in Geoffrey Bentwood QC, who specialises in boring his clients to death, while not-so-secretly longing to be promoted to the bench; his sidekick, Edward Longwind, who takes lessons in pomposity from Sir Geoffrey; Richard Loophole of Loophole and Fillibuster who does his best to bankrupt his clients, while working his associates to death and pretending to remember some of the law he learned at school; and at the mercy of all of them is the luckless Mr Sprocket, the endlessly unsuccessful litigant whose lawyers will not rest until they have spent all of his money. This work features the best of the 'Queen's Counsel' cartoon strip from "The Times". Click here.

6.   If your favourite lawyer needs a smile this Christmas (maybe there was no year-end bonus this time around) consider picking up this little gem, which includes such seasonal favourites as "Let 'em sue" and "It's going to be a billable Christmas". The whole family can sing along. There's nothing like it for creating a sentimental Christmas ambience. Click here.

7.  For many Baby Boomers, death can be a touchy subject. They need to keep their inheritance away from step relatives, charities and caring neighbors. The more money at stake, the more potential beneficiaries seem to turn up. Meanwhile, their parents are growing older and less inclined to leave all their money to their children, as of right. Even after receiving an inheritance the Baby Boomer’s own adult children are a challenge. They can range from "competent and never call" to "have trouble sitting the right way round on a toilet seat." Their children are forever marrying (or failing to marry) spendthrift, drunken, philandering partners. At 62 years old, the oldest Baby Boomers increasingly find themselves under siege from many different quarters to make a decision. This attention is heightened by there being more money at stake. The Legal Guide to Dying-Baby Boomer Edition is the ultimate Exit Tool for those Boomers with little time to spare. Click here to give your lawyer some truly enjoyable reading.

8.  You know, if there's one thing estate planning lawyers lament, it's the fact that we're so darn good at planning and our documents are so airtight, we just don't spend much time in the courtroom anymore. There's hardly a lawsuit to be had among us (Anyone else knocking on wood? Am I tempting the litigation gods? Is that a bus heading straight for me?). For the lawyer in your life who can't get enough of the adrenaline rush known as litigation, here's a fun substitute: Lawsuit - the board game! Click here, and he or she will love you for it, trust me.

And finally... for those of you who put things off until you get around to it, here you go. Problem solved. It's a genuine Round Tuit. Click here, when you get around to it of course. You're welcome.