Burbank, Calif., planner Cameron Thornton worked with one of his first clients for 15 years and devoted much of that time to estate planning. An entrepreneur with a 40-year-old business, the client prepared meticulously to pass his assets on to his wife and children. But when he died, the worst happened.

"I watched it all just implode," Thornton recalls. Each of his children lawyered up and went to war with one another. The years of work on estate planning were largely for naught. The one key element that Thornton thinks he and his client missed - and many planners still miss - was involving the family in a pre-inheritance process.

"They hadn't been prepared for the money," Thornton says. The experience prompted an epiphany. It set him on a path that led him to found a second company alongside his planning practice - Navigator Legacy Partners. It's devoted to preparing wealthy families for the transformational experience of inheritance.

"We want this money to be a blessing, not a curse, as it often is," Thornton says. "It doesn't matter where you are, in a capitalist or communist society. Wealth rarely survives to the third generation." Prevailing wisdom holds that in 90% of such cases, families suffer from this third-generation curse. Navigator Legacy works with families who answer yes to the following question: Do you want to break the cycle?

In his 30-year-old planning practice, Thornton manages about $100 million in assets, with clients' investable assets ranging from $1 million to $10 million. But, since founding Navigator Legacy in 2006, he says, much larger clients, with assets up to a $250 million, have found their way to him.

EMOTIONAL TERRAIN

"There are so few people doing this work right now," says Thornton, who uses the term heritage planning. The work takes Thornton and his two co-founders deep into the heart of murky emotional terrain where many financial professionals fear to tread. It's not therapy, but it does tap Thornton's undergraduate degree in psychology. It utilizes a process developed by the Lake Oswego, Ore.-based Heritage Institute.

The institute studies those 10% of families who manage to beat the dreaded third-generation curse. Its founders have developed a process the institute uses to train legal, financial, nonprofit and other professionals to help wealthy families remain unified through "the financial and the emotional inheritances they will receive." All three Navigator team members are licensed through the institute to use the proprietary "guided discovery process" that begins with them listening deeply to each family member.

"I don't care about facts when we are doing this," he says. "Where the conversation goes is where we follow. It's not uncommon that people start crying because the process uncovers what means most to you."

In this way, Thornton helps families gather and pass on the stories and values that constitute a family's emotional inheritance. Over the course of a period that may last weeks, months or longer, the Navigator team helps families come together to create a family council, a family fund and their own approach to philanthropy. These are not legally binding, but serve as guiding tools for the family as it goes forward.

ATTITUDE ADJUSTMENT

Often, Thornton says, he has seen domineering patriarchs, accustomed to being firmly in control, morph into "marshmallows" as their heirs come to understand their stories and as they come to appreciate the often-quieter achievements of descendants who may be teachers, small businesspeople or artists. The ultimate goal, Thornton says, is to focus on "the business of being a family and not on the family business."

In the best cases, families that once were at odds end up being able to relax together, to travel together on ski trips and beach vacations. They can develop a new ability to enjoy one another's company and experience a new level of family unity, Thornton says.

Steve Marken, the founder of Caritas Legacy Group, met Thornton a few years ago while working as director of gift planning at the Orange County Community Foundation. At the foundation, Marken says, he began working with an advisor to a family in a tiny oil town in central California. He learned that the father had gifted shares in his oil company to his wife and children before a major discovery made all of them suddenly very wealthy.

Increasingly, the father worried that he had inadvertently harmed his daughters because their new wealth had altered the way some of their lifelong neighbors treated them. And this made him worry about the impact of future inheritance. Other tensions, such as the father's poor relationship with one of his son-in-laws, divided the family.