Author: Justin Cutler
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How to Hire and Train a Great Paralegal for Your Estate Planning Practice
I don’t currently employ a paralegal but I’ve hired a few. Here’s what I learned.
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How Intake Automation Helps Estate Planning Attorneys Respond Faster (And Win More Clients)
It’s not that you don’t want to respond quickly to new estate planning inquiries. It’s that you’re already in the middle of something else when they come in. A client email arrives while you’re on a call. A voicemail hits while you’re reviewing drafts. A website form submission lands… and then sits. Not because you…
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The Estate Plan Drafting Workflow Of The Future
In my experience, it’s not drafting that slows estate planning down. It’s everything that happens before drafting ever begins. Most estate planning attorneys don’t spend hours writing documents because they enjoy it. They spend hours drafting because the workflow feeding those documents is fragmented, manual, and full of judgment calls that have to be re-made…
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Intake-to-Draft Automation for Estate Planning Attorneys: The Workflow That Saves Hours on Every Matter
It’s a familiar scene: you finally sit down to draft a plan, only to realize the client left half the questionnaire blank… again. So you email. They reply with partial answers. You follow up. They answer one question and skip three. Eventually you get enough information to start drafting — but only after chasing details…
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How to Design a Client-Friendly Estate Planning Intake Form (With a Real-World Case Study)
When clients don’t finish your intake form, the problem usually isn’t them. It’s the form. Owning that fact was a turning point for me in my own estate planning practice. Static, dense questionnaires feel like data-dumps instead of meaningful onboarding. In an era where people expect convenience, clarity, and mobile-friendly experiences, traditional estate-planning questionnaires can…
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Stop Copy-Pasting Clauses: How Deterministic Drafting Protects Your Work Product
Every time I tried the copy-paste approach, I had a good reason. Usually the reason was to save time. I’d open a document labeled something like, “Smith Family Trust – FINAL_FINALv3.docx,” duplicate it, and start swapping names, dates, and a few custom provisions. After a while, I’d be juggling three versions of the same document…
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Why Clients Avoid Estate Planning Questionnaires (And How Modern Intake Fixes It)
You’ve probably seen it happen: a prospective client finds your firm, clicks into your “Get Started” or “Client Intake” page, begins filling out your estate-planning questionnaire … and then disappears. Their browser closes, never to return — and with it, the opportunity to help a family with their planning needs. This vanishing act isn’t magic…
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Collaborative Drafting for Estate Planning Firms (Without the Chaos)
If you’ve ever opened a folder and found Final Draft_v4_REAL_final(2).docx, you already know: collaborative drafting in a small estate planning firm can feel like herding cats. Very detail-oriented cats. Armed with Microsoft Word. But still a problem. Even when your team is small—maybe a partner, an associate, a paralegal, and the world’s most reliable virtual…
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Template Governance for Estate Planning Firms: A Practical Guide
There’s a quiet kind of chaos that lives inside most estate planning firms. It’s not the urgent phone calls. It’s not the client emergencies. It’s not even the four different asset spreadsheets clients send “just in case.” It’s your templates. If you’ve ever lost 10 minutes trying to figure out whether Will_Template_FINAL(2) or Will_Template_NEW_2023_REAL is…
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Estate Planning Intake Is Broken (And Costing You More Than You Think)
There’s a special kind of email that hits your inbox at 4:59 pm. The subject line looks innocent enough: “Here are our forms!” You open the intake packet and find that half the pages are blank. No beneficiary info. No clarity on the family dynamics. A few question marks. Maybe a sticky note. You immediately…
