AI in Estate Planning: Improved External Tools

Changing how we engage

Table of Contents

1. Where We Left Off

2. The Fiduciary Draft – Concept and Initial Tests

3. The Fiduciary Draft – Beta Version

4. Broader Estate Planning Tools

Where We Left Off

This series has generally examined a variety of internal AI tools and strategies attorneys can use to quickly review large volumes of data, along with the relatively-nascent idea of using AI tools to draft by merging form documents and meeting notes.

Almost a year ago, I kicked off my AI thought leadership in a panel discussion at the Colorado Bar Trusts & Estates Retreat. I continue to be blown away by the progress AI has made since that time. All of our ethical cautions from that panel discussion remain true today (with perhaps even more emphasis now on the danger of breaching intellectual property rights). The scope of what is possible with AI, however, has drastically expanded.

The panel, and this article series, has been all business so far. But, it is also important to have some fun on occasion. We spend a lot of time also examining our intake processes and communications with clients, and tons of thought leaders have covered the utility of AI for these functions. However, I think we are still thinking too small when it comes to ways we can interface with clients. Could we, for example, gamify estate planning?

To put my money where my mouth is, I tested an app-building tool called Replit to see what it could do. I was impressed, especially given my lack of coding knowledge (the only programming I ever did was in BASIC on an Apple IIC computer back in the late 80’s). Now, as a caution, Replit is not going to give you instant results off-the-shelf. The platform takes some iterations (which may be limited as “agent checkpoints” depending on your subscription plan tier) to get to your desired results, but it does leave some room for things to be updated over time.

My results are after the paywall below. For now, however, note that this is not a one-off app I am sharing. I already have two others being tested, with several others in the works. I will share each app and tool I develop with paid subscribers to the newsletter, as an added bonus. Much like my goal is providing education that meets a middle ground, an added goal is to provide you with goldilocks estate planning tools - not so simple as to be useless, but not so complicated as to demand a SaaS subscription as part of your tech stack.

The Fiduciary Draft – Concept and Initial Tests

Griffin, I see all these direct-to-advisor estate document drafting platforms coming out, and to be frank they look like promising solutions for me and for my clients. But let’s take, for example, a selection of guardian by me and my spouse for our children. Where would we get this kind of guidance as we are filling out the interview form for the preparation of the documents? Sure, the interview takes 5 minutes, but you need to think through these vital decisions before you sit down to start.

This was a question posed to me by a prominent thought leader and innovator in their own right in the wealth advisory space last fall. It got my creative wheels turning, as the question highlights a problem that is not unique to these types of drafting platforms.

Often in estate planning, fiduciary selection is a sticking point for clients. It can be difficult to get this right, and to feel comfortable about one’s changes. Sometimes the act of brainstorming can be enough – perhaps just writing down names of people you might trust, without the pressure of assigning them to a role, can grease the skids. But what if we could take that a step further, to create visual and tactile engagement? Perhaps like in sports, we could have sticky nameplates that can be assigned on a depth chart.

This reminded me of old school fantasy sports drafts, where there might be stickers of various players that could be put up by draft position for each team. Or, as a coach or manager, you might have a depth chart with magnetic name plates that get shuffled around (see, for example, Friday Night Lights or Moneyball). So, I set out to have AI build me a fantasy fiduciary draft. I started with Claude AI.

Claude did a decent job on first pass, as seen in the images below:

A recurring issue as you can see, however, was the unwillingness of Claude after multiple corrections to place the names on the left and the roles on the right to facilitate easy dragging and alignment. The initial app first put the names above the roles, forcing awkward scrolling down, or below the roles with the same awkwardness.

I thought perhaps it was the Claude test environment, but being a neophyte at this stuff, I didn’t want to have to go set up a sandbox in GitHub, Vercel, or a similar tool to test this outside of Claude (partially because I’m cheap). So, I sought out an environment where I could test the app in real time while also perhaps deploying and updating it.

Enter Replit. After some iterations, I had a workable version that did what I wanted it to do – prompt the user to input names of fiduciary candidates, have those names show up alongside fiduciary roles with drag-and-drop and reuse capability (along with choices for “Unknown” or “N/A”), and then generate a report of your proposed “draft” that could be printed or saved to .pdf to share with an attorney or advisor.

The Fiduciary Draft – Beta Version