Kahan built a pro bono channel, not a gesture

Scott Kahan was in San Diego for the Financial Planning Association's annual conference on Sept. 10, 2001, and he woke the next morning to watch the attacks unfold from the far side of the country, then spent several days unable to fly home, his two children still young, aircraft climbing out from the base into a clear sky. "Nobody knew what was going to happen," he told Wealth Management in a retrospective published 25 years on.

Kahan, now president of Financial Asset Management Corporation, a New York firm with offices in the city and in Chappaqua roughly 35 miles north of Manhattan, grew up in Yonkers, went to Syracuse University, and started his practice in 1986, accumulating fifteen years of client relationships by the time the towers came down.

What he understood, stranded in California with no way home, was that a second problem was about to arrive behind the rescue effort. In the weeks after the attacks, Congress created the September 11 Victim Compensation Fund on top of money organized by private organizations and by New York City, and families then had to establish their right to compensation and work out how much any one of them should receive along paths the coverage describes as confusing. Many of the victims, Kahan found, had died without wills, leaving estates to be reconstructed after the fact.

He watched attorneys and others charge large fees to help families meet those requirements, which he regarded as unethical, so his answer was organizational: he helped build pro bono capacity through the FPA in New York and Washington, D.C., alongside Trial Lawyers Care, an attorneys' group established to provide pro bono services to victims' families, an effort Wealth Management describes as launching a movement that continues today.

Kahan's caseload was compensation claims with no precedent, wills that did not exist, and clients who had never run a household balance sheet now doing it in the worst month of their lives. He commuted into the city from Chappaqua and passed walls of "Missing" posters every day, and he recalls helping a woman with little financial background who was trying to understand what to do after her son was killed in the attacks. "It's unimaginable to some degree," he said. "It's unbelievable that it's 25 years ago, but yeah, it's unimaginable now, just thinking about it and watching it."

The anniversary makes visible a generational fact: Kahan was a decade and a half into his career in 2001, and the planners who answered that call alongside him were mid-career then and are late-career now, which means the volunteer corps that staffed the 9/11 effort is the same cohort currently deciding what happens to its practices. That is an inference from a single career, not a census, but the arithmetic is not subtle.

It would be easy to file this under goodwill and move on. The more useful reading is that Kahan did not merely volunteer; he built a channel. The mechanics were an association to convene the planners, a legal organization to co-sign the work, and a defined population of families at the other end of the phone. Willingness is not scarce in this profession; a pipe that converts willingness into scheduled appointments is, and it is the part of the 2001 effort a firm can copy without asking anyone's permission.

The work itself reads like a preview of the highest-value planning advisors sell today: translating a benefit and compensation rule set no family had ever seen, assembling estate documents for people who died without them, coordinating with lawyers who own the legal question while you own the numbers. This publication has argued that tax and estate work is the last high-margin skill standing in a business that has commoditized portfolio construction, and the 9/11 effort shows the skill underneath the skill: reading an unfamiliar rule set fast and explaining it to someone who is in no state to absorb it.

That is why the standard pitch for pro bono undersells the thing. Nowhere else does a planner get repetitions at this level of complexity with this much riding on getting it right; a firm that wants advisors who can handle a founder's estate, a beneficiary designation gone wrong, or a family business with no succession documents is describing the same competencies Kahan's volunteers had to summon in 2001 without a template to work from.

Standing up a version of it takes less than a firm expects. Someone has to name the partner organization — a legal aid office, a bar association's pro bono arm, a local FPA chapter — so referrals have a source; the scope has to be written down, because "we help with anything" breaks the first time a volunteer gets a call about a guardianship fight; and one partner has to own the bench, including the judgment calls about what the firm will not take on. Hours should be logged, less for the plaque than because an unmeasured program is the first thing cut when a quarter gets busy.

None of that is glamorous, and none of it requires a foundation or a budget line; it requires a name on a piece of paper and a partner who will answer the phone.

Kahan's apparatus in 2001 was an association, a legal partner, and planners willing to pick up the phone. The first two are infrastructure that already exists in most markets and can be borrowed with one call; the third is a staffing decision, and it costs a firm one partner's attention to make it.