Trust certifications and funding
Your trust only works when your accounts are in it.
Every bank, brokerage and insurer wants its own trust paperwork. Six Clerks prepares each one from your trust, gets it signed and notarized, delivers it, and follows up until the account is done.
Opening in stages. Join the early access list and we will reach out.
Illustrative file. Institutions named are examples, not partners.
institutional trust certification forms. No two alike.
Six Clerks' Wealth Transfer Institute, Report Onepages, for the same task: proving who can act for a trust.
Six Clerks' Wealth Transfer Institute, Report OneA safe protects the watch only once the watch is inside it.
A trust works the same way. Signing it builds the safe. Retitling your house, your accounts and your policies puts things inside.
Most people stop at the signing. Not out of laziness: each institution has its own form, its own signature rules and its own notary page, and nobody hands you the list.
Anything left outside the trust goes through probate anyway.
How Six Clerks works
One file, accepted on both sides.
Trustees need institutions to accept their authority. Institutions need paperwork they can rely on. We sit in the middle and do the work for both.
Families with a trust
- Fund a new or old trust
- Answer an institution that asked
- Take over as successor trustee
and requests
One file. Every counterparty.
We read the trust once, map it to each institution's own form, run signatures and notarization, deliver the packet and follow up. A law firm reviews every file.
consistent packets
Banks, brokerages, insurers
- Their own form, completed
- Every signature, every notary field
- Updates when trustees change
Every file builds the map
Each account completed at an institution becomes a reusable packet: the right form, the field map, who signs, which notary page, where it goes.
The next file goes faster
The second family with a Merrill Edge account starts where the first one finished. That is how the cost comes down.
Institutions see it arrive complete
Their own form, every field filled, every signature and notary block done. Fewer rejections on their side, fewer trips on yours.
Left outside the trust
An unfunded account goes to probate anyway.
in combined statutory attorney and executor fees on a $1.5 million California estate
Cal. Prob. Code §§ 10800, 10810months for a typical California probate, before heirs receive anything
Superior Courts of California, Nevada and Lassen CountiesEvery probate file is open to anyone who asks. A trust stays private.
Superior Court of California, Sacramento CountyFor trustees
You tell us the accounts. We do the paperwork.
- Upload your trustOnce. Invite any co-trustees.
- List the accountsWe learn what each institution requires.
- We prepare it allTheir forms, from your trust. Lawyer reviewed.
- You signOnline notary where the institution accepts it.
- We deliverAnd follow up until each account is done.
For institutions
Your customers will arrive with your form, already complete.
Trustees who come through Six Clerks bring your own certification form, completed from the trust, reviewed by a lawyer and properly executed. Map your form once. Every Six Clerks file after that arrives on it.
Guides
Know what you are being asked for.
272 forms. Not one alike.
What we found when we collected the trust certification forms institutions actually use.
See the research When you're askedYour bank asked for a certification of trust. Now what?
What to do, in order, to avoid the common rejections.
Read the guide The basicsCertification, certificate, memorandum: what they all mean
One job, five names, and what California law requires.
Read the guideWho we are
Built by a lawyer who sat on the bank's side of the table.
Ben Spohn is a real estate and finance lawyer, the founder of Spohn Law, and a former Vice President and Associate General Counsel at First Republic Bank, where he ran trust certification from the bank's side. Six Clerks is what he wished existed on both sides of that desk.
Named for the Six Clerks of Chancery, the sworn officers of the Great Seal who kept the records of the court where trust law was born.
Our historySigned isn't funded.
We finish the job your trust started.