EPI Estate Planning Intensive Griffin Bridgers

§ 00 Flagship live programs, 2026

Estate planning taught the way we wish we'd been taught.

Two intensive live courses — Foundations in Estate Planning and Advanced Estate Planning — taught by Griffin Bridgers and Jennifer Belmont Jennings. Each runs as a single focused day, offered on your choice of two dates.

See the 2026 courses → Browse the article index

Held at least once a year. These are the 2026 dates.

§ 01 The courses

Our flagship programs, held at least annually.

Foundations and Advanced are the two cornerstone courses of the Estate Planning Intensive. Each is offered live at least once a year; the dates below are the 2026 offerings. Choose whichever date fits your calendar — the content is the same.

Foundations in Estate Planning

The core body of knowledge every estate planning professional is assumed to have and is rarely taught directly: the documents, the transfer tax framework, trust fundamentals, and how the pieces actually fit together in a working plan.

Taught by Griffin Bridgers and Jennifer Belmont Jennings

LEVEL 01

choose one date

November 10, 2026 Tuesday
  • Session 110:00a–1:00p ET · 7:00–10:00a PT
  • Breakone hour
  • Session 22:00–5:00p ET · 11:00a–2:00p PT
November 19, 2026 Thursday
  • Session 111:00a–2:00p ET · 8:00–11:00a PT
  • Breakone hour
  • Session 23:00–6:00p ET · 12:00–3:00p PT

tuition

Early bird NOWthrough Oct 15, 2026
$400
Regular NOWfrom Oct 16, 2026
$500
Register for Tue, Nov 10 → Register for Thu, Nov 19 →
  • both live sessions
  • course materials
  • full recording

Registration is through Zoom Webinars, and each date registers separately — sign up for the one date you'll attend. Registering a group? Contact Griffin about group registrations and discounts.

agenda

MODULE 1 session 1

The Building Blocks

  1. Common documents
  2. Forms of property, property rights, and digital assets
  3. Principles of co-ownership between spouses, and non-spouses
  4. Trusts — classifications, roles, and powers
  5. Powers of appointment, disclaimers, and other beneficiary or donee powers
  6. Fiduciary roles and duties
  7. Wills, will contests, and document formalities
  8. Methods of transfer at death through both probate and non-probate methods
  9. Revocable trusts
  10. Intestacy laws
MODULE 2 session 2

Putting the Plan to Work

  1. Common principles of estate and trust administration
  2. Provisions common to both trusts and wills
  3. Residuary formula clauses and pecuniary gifts — the basics
  4. Introduction to the federal estate and gift taxes
  5. Elementary principles of generation-skipping transfer tax
  6. Retirement asset planning
  7. Life insurance planning
  8. Introduction to grantor trusts and trust tax ID numbers
  9. Credit shelter and marital trusts
  10. A special closing session — what we wish we had known…

Advanced Estate Planning

For practitioners already working in the field: the techniques, elections, and intersections where estate planning gets genuinely difficult — and where the expensive mistakes are made.

Taught by Griffin Bridgers and Jennifer Belmont Jennings

LEVEL 02

Experience beyond the classroom

// what we bring besides our degrees

GRIFFIN BRIDGERS Griffin's teaching is informed by several years of not just drafting estate plans for clients with taxable estates, but also reviewing and managing estate plans for clients with net worths up to $1 billion through a shared family office.

JENNIFER BELMONT JENNINGS Jennifer's experience as a wealth advisor — at a major financial institution and at a national RIA — is bookended by her legal career representing ultra-high net worth clients.

choose one date

December 3, 2026 Thursday
  • Session 110:00a–1:00p ET · 7:00–10:00a PT
  • Breakone hour
  • Session 22:00–5:00p ET · 11:00a–2:00p PT
December 10, 2026 Thursday
  • Session 111:00a–2:00p ET · 8:00–11:00a PT
  • Breakone hour
  • Session 23:00–6:00p ET · 12:00–3:00p PT

tuition

Early bird NOWthrough Nov 15, 2026
$575
Regular NOWfrom Nov 16, 2026
$675
Register for Thu, Dec 3 → Register for Thu, Dec 10 →
  • both live sessions
  • course materials
  • full recording

Registration is through Zoom Webinars, and each date registers separately — sign up for the one date you'll attend. Registering a group? Contact Griffin about group registrations and discounts.

agenda

MODULE 1 session 1

Getting the Basics Right

  1. How not to let the zeroes intimidate you
  2. Current state of affairs: exemptions, exclusions, basis step-ups, and leverage
  3. Start with the end in mind: formula transfers at death
  4. Preparing for lifetime transfers: asset identification, valuation, and more
  5. Navigating spousal property rights, marital agreements, and required consents for wealth transfers
  6. Gifts versus sales
  7. Lifetime formula transfers, and formula powers of appointment
  8. Trust decanting and modification — a high-level overview
MODULE 2 session 2

Where Foundation Meets Technical Strategy

  1. Income taxation of trusts, revisited, and intro to the BDOT and BDIT
  2. Business entities, buy-sell agreements, and effects on transfer
  3. Common transfer strategies — SLAT, ILIT, and IDGT
  4. A deeper dive with QTIPs, with bonus coverage of important recent cases
  5. An intro to retained interest transfers — GRAT, QPRT, and others
  6. Charitable transfers: considerations for direct, formula, and split-interest strategies
  7. Retirement asset issues beyond RMDs

§ 02 Who it's for

Built for professionals who make estate planning their main practice.

These courses are designed for any wealth transfer professional who provides — or aspires to provide — estate planning as a main service area.

For firm partners & team leads

Training new associates, with less and less time to do it?

If you're a law firm partner, or anyone charged with bringing new professionals up to speed, you often encounter a training gap that is imperfectly filled. On-the-job training covers the file in front of trainees. Black-letter principles cover the rules. Connecting the two falls to you — and the more capacity-constrained you become, the wider that gap gets.

That gap is exactly what these courses are built to fill. Foundations gives new associates the working framework; Advanced takes them into the techniques and intersections where mistakes get expensive.

// training a team? Group registrations and group discounts are available — get in touch.
Contact Griffin →

§ 03 Your instructors

Both courses, taught by both of us.

We are practitioners first — this is the work we actually do — and instructors second. Between us we have spent years teaching estate planning in CFP® preparation programs, and we found that curriculum builds a foundation that serves attorneys and other professionals just as well as it serves financial advisors. (In fact, Griffin's entire foundation of thought leadership and advanced practice can be traced back to his years as a CFP instructor.)

Griffin Bridgers

J.D., LL.M. (Taxation)

Member, Illumine Legal LLC — Denver, Colorado

Griffin is a go-to resource in tax and estate planning for thousands of attorneys, wealth strategists, CPAs, trust officers, and advisors through his Substack newsletter, State of Estates, and his YouTube channel.

Read moreRead less

Alongside his law practice, Griffin serves as an outsourced subject matter expert in estate and wealth transfer for registered investment advisory firms, CPAs, and family offices — recognizing that many independent advisors lack the scale to bring that expertise in-house full time.

He brings more than seventeen years of experience in comprehensive estate, tax, charitable, and business succession planning for business owners, executives, real estate professionals, athletes, and startup founders. Beyond drafting plans for clients with taxable estates, he has spent several years reviewing and managing estate plans for clients with net worths up to $1 billion through a shared family office.

He speaks frequently at continuing education programs, and writes several times a week for an audience of fellow practitioners.

State of Estates ↗ YouTube ↗ Article index →

Jennifer Belmont Jennings

J.D., CFP®

Member, MGD Law — St. Louis, Missouri

Jennifer is a trusts and estates attorney whose practice spans estate and wealth planning for individuals and families looking to build and protect their legacies — and an experienced instructor and thought leader in the field.

Read moreRead less

Her work runs from foundational estate plans — wills, trusts, and powers of attorney — through complex estate and tax planning, charitable planning, prenuptial agreements, and post-death estate and trust administration.

Her years as a wealth advisor, at a major financial institution and at a national RIA, are bookended by her legal career representing higher-net-worth individuals — the combination behind the CFP® designation she holds alongside her law degree.

She received her J.D., M.A., and B.A. magna cum laude from Washington University in St. Louis, and completed the General Course Program at the London School of Economics. She was named to the St. Louis Business Journal 40 Under 40 in 2020, serves on several nonprofit boards, and co-authored Women in Law: Discovering the True Meaning of Success.

Firm bio ↗ LinkedIn ↗
Our aim is the middle ground. Not so simplified that it is useless in practice, and not so technical that it is really just showing off. We teach what we wish we had known early on, along with the connections and inflection points that have proven most useful to our students over several years of instruction.

§ 04 Format

Six hours of live instruction, in one day.

01

Two three-hour sessions

Each course is delivered as two live three-hour webinar sessions, taught back to back on a single day, with a full one-hour break in between.

02

Two dates to choose from

Every course runs twice, on two separate dates at two different start times. Pick the one that works for your time zone and your calendar — you attend one, not both.

03

Live and interactive

These are taught live, not pre-recorded. Come with questions about the matters actually sitting on your desk.

04

Materials and recording included

Every registrant receives the course materials and a recording of the full course afterward — revisit a topic later, or catch anything you missed live.

A note on continuing education. We intend to seek CLE credit in select states for these courses, and we are looking into additional credit opportunities beyond CLE. Stay tuned for announcements as those approvals are sought. Please note that continuing education credit is not a guaranteed perk of enrollment — register for the substance of the course, and treat any credit that comes through as a bonus.

§ 05 In the meantime

Keep learning between sessions.

The courses run at least once a year. Griffin's writing runs several times a week. Every article he has published on State of Estates is indexed, organized by topic and fully searchable, so you can go deep on whatever is in front of you right now.

→ The article index

A searchable library of Griffin's writing.

Hundreds of articles on transfer tax, trusts, Subchapter J, business entities, retirement accounts, drafting, and practice — grouped into topics and series you can expand one at a time, or search all at once.

Open the Index →
300+
articles indexed
26
topics covered