What is the best step to take?
FIRST go find good local counsel. Estate management is a complex business. The internet is no place to go to learn how to do what you proppse.
As to legacies: There are two kinds. One is financial wealth. The most important is the legacy of diligence and struggle. Without that, any accumulated fiscal wealth will pass through the descendant's hand like water. Passing that legacy on as a positive and without making it into a negative is a challenge.
Wealth in my family started with my mother's mother.
Pregnant with twins that woman undertook an open-air fully exposed journey on a vegetable boat from Puerto Rico to CT. She produced my mother and her sister shortly after making landfall.
A few years later the two sisters were orphaned. This was a century ago; there was no public welfare or child services. My mother was fortunate being adopted by a local businessman whose legacy for her was that her education at Mount Holyoake was paid for.
She passed her value of education onto her children and in spite of her very difficult adult life and relative poverty, it took. Her children valued education because that's what they were taught.
My daughter learned this and more from me. My expectations of her were part of the legacy she carries today and part of the legacy she trained into her daughters. My daughter built an accounting business that is sufficiently lucrative that she can send her daughters to the best schools and do it out of pocket.
It is slow. It is usually the grandchildren who benefit the most. But the parents the grandparents and in my case the great, great grandparents had to sacrifice and struggle and impose substantial expectations on their progeny. And that latter legacy of diligence and struggle has to be done in a way that survives the transition from parent to child, to child, again and again. If that latter component of the forgoer's legacy fails to translate, the children for whom t it does fail will be at risk of losing it all and even squandering the accumulated fiscal wealth. I saw it fail like that for the Studabaker family whose wealth was squandered and lost and again to a family's women's fashion business, when the daughters married indolent men who when they took control treated it as a cash machine living way, way above their means like they were captains of industry and finally robbing the employee's retirement plans to finance their excesses.
So even if you have no money, you can pass on an incredibly valuable legacy.
If you have wealth by which I mean substantial money in the millions you have to do a cold hard bloodless evaluation of the character of your children. If in your estimation they won't be responsible you can trust fund it to them.
You can control these trust funds for the life of any "person in being" at the time of your demise.
That phrase gave my colleagues in law school fits. It is as open-ended as it might seem, Any and all of the people alive on the planet can produce the construct of the "person in being" against which the duration of your cold dead hand can control your assets after you are gone. Once the longest potential life span is exhausted your assets can be fought over by the heirs.
You can defeat that by forming a family corporation that can live indefinitely and ensure that the board is composed of enough non-family members ( a law firm) who will prevent any deviation from the corporate charter and bylaws which would be yours to craft.
You'll need local counsel for any of this.
If OTOH you trust your kids then just leave it to them.
If you haven't got the billions, but what you have you want them to take without being taxed to death, find out what your state's Gift Tax is and stay beneath the threshold for any given year.
