Fordham Law alumna Elisa Shevlin Rizzo ’98 was featured in a Barron’s article about her work on estate administration cases for victims of the 9/11 attacks.
After 9/11, the widow of a man who died in the World Trade Center learned a shocking if seemingly mundane fact: Some of her husband’s retirement accounts didn’t name her or her children as beneficiaries.
Instead, the funds in these accounts were destined to go to her husband’s mother and brother, bypassing her and the children, says Elisa Shevlin Rizzo, then a 30-year-old attorney handling the woman’s estate administration at Cummings & Lockwood, a Connecticut law firm.
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Many of Cummings & Lockwood’s clients were killed in the attacks, and because Rizzo was new to the firm and not loaded with other work, she raised her hand to take on the estate administration for five widows. Most of the women were in their late 30s or early 40s, although one in her early 60s lost her husband weeks before he planned to retire. Rizzo has tried to apply what she learned in the 3 1/2 years that followed to every client since, she says.
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At Northern Trust, which Rizzo joined nearly a year ago, she plans to focus more on pre-death planning. “If you have things well-organized ahead of time, it’s going to make the surviving partner’s life that much easier during those couple of months where it is really triage,” she says.
That was a lesson Rizzo learned early as she aided the 9/11 widows, and has drawn on since. Making sure tedious details are taken care of, such as titling assets with the correct names, and establishing an emergency fund for short-term expenses, can have far-reaching implications should tragedy strike. “Some of the more administrative tasks around estate planning can become routine,” Rizzo says. “I try to keep in mind what it can mean, so that it never gets routine.”
