Hargrove, a Kentucky-based estate planning law firm that works with RIAs and wealth managers, has hired former Carson Group VP of estate planning David Haughton to be its new vice president of engagement.
Haughton spent one year at Carson Group, joining the mega-RIA in August 2025. He spent the previous year as senior corporate counsel at the estate planning fintech Wealth.com, according to his LinkedIn. He worked for six years at Commonwealth Financial Network from 2018 to 2024, most recently as team lead of advanced planning.
Haughton told InvestmentNews that the trend of advisors growing their client base beyond regional ties creates more of a need for those advisors to partner with an estate planning law firm. Hargrove provides estate planning services to clients across all 50 states for firms overseeing more than $400 billion in client assets.
“Advisors' books are becoming less geographically concentrated, and so they don't have the center of influence attorney in their state or in their locality to be able to refer to as often as it used to be,” said Haughton. “Hargrove [provides] a really fresh option to have an attorney available that's advisor friendly in their approach to help motivate [clients] to get a plan in place.”
Haughton joins Hargrove after his previous employer, Carson Group, was among the mega-RIAs to use the law firm for estate planning. During Haughton’s year at Carson Group, the firm launched a dedicated estate planning program for its network of advisors.
Other RIA aggregators whose advisors use Hargrove’s estate planning legal services include Merit Financial Advisors, Mariner Wealth Advisors, and Wealth Enhancement, says Alex Hargrove, CEO of Hargrove Management Services Organization (MSO).
“We really cut our teeth with RIAs, and particularly with mega-RIAs. Because they've got clients in virtually every state, and local law firms don't scale with their businesses,” added Hargrove, who says his law firm employs nearly 20 attorneys full-time.
Hargrove MSO was known as NetLaw before the firm announced a rebrand last month. Hargrove says it's common for the law firm’s partnered advisors to also work with estate planning software tools like Wealth.com, Vanilla, or Luminary.
“We think those tools are fantastic as long as they're done in the context of advisors having an easy path to then go meet with an attorney at Hargrove or somewhere else, so that it's not just the advisor and the AI that are the last words that clients are ultimately relying on when it comes to pretty sensitive legal matters around their estate planning,” said Hargrove. “I think we're seeing an increasing number of firms that are questioning if a pure technology solution is right for all of their clients.”
Haughton will be based in Boston to help lead Hargrove's expanded presence in the Northeast. Private equity firm Conditor Equity made an investment into Hargrove in 2025, with AssetMark founder Ron Cordes also being an investor in the firm.
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