Software Is For Lawyers, It Doesn’t Sell Trusts

Last week I spent three days with estate planning attorneys training them on what they were already masters at, Medicaid and asset protection planning. I was intrigued by the end of the three days how perplexed they were at how much they didn’t know. All of the options and variations one can have when drafting a trust or asset protection plan. Most notably however was the response when they were able to see for the first time how document creation software can be more than a trust drafting system.

For example, they learned how designing a trust with the client became a celebration and an experience as we walked the client through their lifetime and asked them the various questions of what they would want to have happen. The power of customizing at every single decision point was especially intriguing. But most exciting was the result of the design experience that created a highly customized trust that was part of a package that generated all the documents necessary for the plan that the client created.

Then, what shocked them even more was discovering how the software was merely the culmination of an entire education-based client enrollment system of teaching clients what they don’t know in a two-hour workshop, followed by revisiting the 15 major challenges in estate planning and comparing them to the prospective clients current plan to identify where all the holes were. Finally allowing the client to identify which of the missing issues were most critical for them to solve.

Their process once again culminated in choosing an estate plan or asset protection plan that was hand picked by the client, based on their needs, not on software the lawyer used. The beauty of it all came together when the attorneys learned how they could design a plan according to a structure which confidently allowed them to delegate the drafting of the trust to staff.

The excitement of these lawyers seeing drafting like this. And for the first time that they may not have to draft trusts and doing estate planning could be something far greater than just legal work, but rather a creation of documents that exemplify the client’s life and goals.