Financial Advisor:  “If your client is the executor of a family estate, you can warn him or her it will take an average of 800 hours—that’s 20 full workweeks—to settle most estates. That is, if it doesn’t get bogged down in a battle over an amethyst ring or Green Bay Packers tickets, said EstateExec, a company based in the San Francisco area that creates software for estate executors. It takes an average of 16 months to settle an estate, no matter the size, according to an EstateExec survey of 1,200 people involved in estate settlements. For 80 percent of estates, it takes 800 hours of work by the executor to settle, the survey said, and nearly half, 44 percent, of those surveyed were part of, or were at least aware of, family conflicts that erupted in the settlement process.”