How to Advise Professional Athletes on Estate Planning Matters

Professional athletes are high-visibility clients with concentrated earning windows, complex income streams, and heightened exposure to litigation and media scrutiny. Advising them requires a plan that protects privacy, preserves wealth, and anticipates rapid life changes. In this article we’ll outline practical guidance for lawyers, trust advisers, and estate professionals should you ever work with a professional or college athlete, including how to ensure their assets, legacy, and lawful heirs are protected.

Why Do Athletes Require a Unique Estate Strategies?

The reality for professional athletes is that careers peak early, end quickly, and can change with a single injury. Contracts, incentives, appearance fees, and endorsements create multi-jurisdictional tax and probate considerations. Personal details may be accessible through public records, creating security risks for the client and their family. Your plan should do three things at once:

1. keep sensitive information out of the public domain
2. turn volatile income into durable wealth
3. build clear lines of decision-making for incapacity or death.

Establishing clear, thorough, and legally sound instructions that are reviewed and updated regularly protects your client’s legacy and spares their family costly legal fees and heartache down the road.

Public Interest in Professional Athletes

We talk a lot about how essential wills are to protect your clients. For professional athletes though, a will alone is seldom sufficient. The probate process can expose private assets, family relationships, and bequests.

A revocable living trust can manage assets during a person’s lifetime and distribute them privately upon death. The trust can include assets like real estate, intellectual property, and other significant assets that a publicly exposed person may wish to keep private. Proper titling reduces name exposure in public filings and improves control.

Lastly, ensure all trust, will, and estate documents include instructions on how information is to be shared with agents, managers, and vendors, and include explicit digital-asset instructions that cover social platforms, domain names, and monetized channels.

Planning for Volatility

Many professional athletes are some of the highest earning people in the country. However, it’s critical to plan for the unexpected, like involuntary early retirement and income cliffs. You can utilize a layered trust for asset protection, and beneficiary discipline (such as staggered distributions) can shield your client from excessive spending. It’s also critical to stay informed about sponsorship clauses to protect your client from income loss should a breach occur.

Income isn’t the only volatile component of a professional athlete’s life. Relocations, marital breakdowns, sponsorships, and the stresses of public life can change an athlete’s life significantly. If and when events of this type occur, review your client’s beneficiary designations on retirement plans and life insurance to ensure their wishes reflect these changes.

Name, Image, and Likeness are Property

Public figures often hold significant value in their publicity rights long after retirement. Treat name, image, likeness, and other intellectual property as discrete assets with licensing calendars, consent controls, and geographic restrictions.

Just like any other asset, document ownership clearly, place rights in a revocable trust or dedicated entity, and specify posthumous licensing guidance to avoid disputes among heirs and business partners.

Philanthropic instruments, such as donor-advised funds or charitable trusts, can align brand values with long-term giving while creating governance guardrails around the client’s name.

The Reality of Life-Threatening Injuries

Athletes face higher exposure to injury and travel-related risk. Durable powers of attorney, health care proxies, and Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act authorizations should be current, jurisdictionally valid, and accessible.

Encourage your client to keep a concise emergency packet for their inner circle and team physicians. Such documentation reduces confusion during travel or events, especially if your client is unable to speak for themselves.

HeirSearch Can Help Establish Heirship for Probate

Athletic careers involve frequent moves, international play, and sometimes complex personal histories. Locating, identifying, and proving heirs can require cross-border research and sensitivity to sealed or fragmented records.

HeirSearch’s highly discrete and capable team can trace heirs across jurisdictions and validate identities, kinship, and documents. We present our search results in court-ready reports, suitable for court proceedings or for probate.

If you’re a legal professional facing the challenge of locating a missing heir or beneficiary in an estate or trust matter, please reach out with any questions.

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