Bring Your Own Templates: Send Them to Us and We’ll Set Them Up (Here’s How to Prepare)

Bring your own templates: send them to us and we’ll set them up. Estate Engine’s team configures your existing documents, or your redlines of our attorney-drafted templates, with a custom intake questionnaire and adds them to your account in 3–5 business days. You don’t upload, map or build anything. Setup is free on Scale and Custom.

You know the trust template I mean. The one you’ve been tightening for years. The successor trustee clause you finally got right, the distribution language you rewrote after a client asked a question you couldn’t answer cleanly, the comma you’d defend in front of a judge.

Now picture rebuilding it field by field in someone else’s software. You’d tag every name and pronoun, write if-then rules for every optional article, and test the whole thing on a Saturday. That picture is why a lot of attorneys never automate anything.

Here’s the good news: you don’t do that part. You can automate legal documents you already have without rebuilding them yourself. Your job is to prepare a clean version and review what comes back. Our team handles everything in between.

What “getting your templates into Estate Engine” actually means

Getting your templates into Estate Engine isn’t a migration project you run. You send your documents; our team configures them, builds the matching intake questionnaire, and adds them to your account. Your job is preparing a clean master of each document and reviewing the result before a client sees it.

If you were picturing a migration, you don’t do the migrating. There’s no import screen, no field-mapping step, and no questionnaire to design from a blank page. You don’t need to create new legal document templates, either. The ones you already trust are the starting point.

Your words stay your words. That’s the whole point of estate planning document automation that drafts from your own language: a client’s plan reads the way you’d have written it by hand, minus the retyping. We’ve made the longer case for why keeping your own template language matters elsewhere. And if you’re still sorting out tool types, here’s how done-for-you setup compares with building it yourself.

Two ways to start: redlines of ours, or your own documents

There are two ways in, and both end the same way: a custom version set up by our team and added to your account.

• Send redlines of our templates. Start from our attorney-drafted, state-specific templates, mark the edits you want, and send them to us. Our team builds your version. This fits attorneys who like most of our language but have firm-specific preferences.
• Send your existing documents. Send the templates you already use, and our team configures them with a custom intake questionnaire. This fits attorneys with a mature set they have no intention of giving up.

If you’re not sure which camp you’re in, start with deciding between our templates and yours. The rest of this piece assumes you’ve already picked.

How to prepare your templates before you send them

Before you send templates for setup, choose one master version of each document, start from your best version rather than your last client file, remove client details, and mark which clauses depend on the client’s facts. Those few steps do most of the work of a smooth setup.

I’ve drafted more than 2,000 plans over 10+ years in practice. In my experience, most firms’ template sets are messier than their owners would like to admit. That’s normal, and it’s fixable. Here’s the full list.

1. Pick one master per document type. Not three trusts from three desktops, each with its own idea of how to name a successor trustee. Before you send anything, settle on one master version of each document. This is word document automation at its simplest: the Word file you pick is the file everything else is built from. If your firm has more than one attorney, this is also the moment to agree on one template set across every attorney in the firm.
2. Start from your ideal version, not your last client file. The Illinois State Bar Association’s document automation checklist makes this point well: the last document you drafted may carry compromises you made for that matter. Start from the version you’d want every client to begin with.
3. Send blank templates, not completed client documents. Strip out names, addresses, account numbers and asset details. A blank template is cleaner to set up, and it keeps client information out of the hand-off entirely.
4. Mark the clauses that depend on the facts. Highlight optional or alternate provisions and add a short note: “use when there are minor children,” “use for a second marriage,” “couples only.” The same ISBA checklist suggests bracketing variable text with matching labels and a highlight color so it stands out. You don’t need fancy notation. You need the logic out of your head and on the page.
5. Note the states you draft in, and list the documents you want set up.
6. Tell us what you need to ask clients. If a clause depends on a fact, that fact has to come from somewhere. Jot down the questions you always ask. If you already use an intake questionnaire or checklist, mention it when you send your templates.
7. If you’re sending redlines, mark your changes directly on our template. Tracked changes in Word work well for this.
8. Review your clauses for current law before you send them. A template you’ve used hundreds of times is consistent. That doesn’t make it current. If a statute has changed since you last opened the master, fix it now so the old language doesn’t get set up along with everything else. It’s also worth knowing who keeps template language current when state law changes.
9. Name one person who answers our questions. Pick the attorney or paralegal who knows why the clauses read the way they do. One point of contact keeps the answers consistent.

When your materials are ready, send them to our team.

That’s your part. Notice what isn’t on the list: tagging fields, writing conditional logic, designing a questionnaire, or testing anything at midnight.

What happens during the 3–5 business days

Custom template setup takes 3–5 business days. In that time Estate Engine’s team configures your documents with a custom intake questionnaire and adds them to your account. Your custom templates draft the same deterministic way as our defaults: the same intake and the same template produce the same document every time.

In plain terms, our team takes your masters and your notes, configures the documents, and builds the questions that feed them. If you want the details, here’s how the intake questionnaire is built around your documents.

Nothing changes about how drafts come out. Each completed intake still produces one bundled .docx with the whole plan in it, and drafting stays deterministic, with no generative AI. That’s why the same intake always produces the same draft, whether the template is ours or yours.

A few specifics: the 3–5 business days start when complete materials arrive and all questions are answered. We rarely need a call to ask clarifying questions but may have some back and forth via email. Once setup is done, we’ll email you directly to let you know the custom templates are live in your Estate Engine account.

Your first review: check it before a client sees it

Before any client fills out your new intake, run a test intake yourself and read the resulting draft against your master. You’re still the reviewing attorney. Setup gets your language into the system; your review confirms it came through the way you meant it.

Pick a fact pattern that exercises your optional clauses, like a married couple with minor children and one specific gift. Then run a simpler one. Compare clause by clause, starting with the ones you flagged in step 4. That’s where a note that was perfectly clear to you might have read differently to someone else.

All payment plans (and the free trial) allow you to run unlimited test drafts without those counting as a billable drafts. So there’s no risk in ensuring it’s right before sending to a real client.

If something’s off, tell our team what you expected and what you got.

What you can still change yourself (and what we change for you)

After setup, you can edit intake question wording and helper text and set your firm’s branding on client intake yourself. Changes to question order, how answers flow into your documents, or the templates themselves go through our team.

You can do this yourself	Our team does this for you
Edit intake question wording and helper text	Change question order
Set firm branding on client intake (logo, font, colors)	Change how questions map to your documents
Send intake links and one-click reminder nudges; complete intake with a client in the room or by phone	Add or configure document templates
	Build a questionnaire from scratch

Why not hand you the controls for everything? We used to offer self-serve setup tools. Almost nobody used them, and attorneys kept asking us to just do it for them. So we do. It’s faster, and the result is better than a weekend project squeezed in between client meetings.

What custom template setup costs

Custom template setup is free on Scale and Custom. On Pay As You Go and Growth, it’s available for a fee, quoted per attorney. Turnaround is 3–5 business days.

Tier	Custom template setup
Pay As You Go ($50 per plan generated)	Available for a fee, quoted per attorney. Contact us for a quote.
Growth ($200/month, 5 drafts included, then $40 per additional draft)	Available for a fee, quoted per attorney. Contact us for a quote.
Scale ($500/month, unlimited plans)	Free
Custom (starting at $700/month, unlimited plans and users)	Free

Pay As You Go, Growth and Scale are single-user plans. If more than one person in your firm needs access, that’s Custom. For the full breakdown, see current pricing and setup details.

Hand-off mistakes that slow setup down

The hand-off is short, which means small gaps in your materials matter more. Four to watch for:

• Sending a completed client file instead of a blank template. Client details have to come out, and one-off language can sneak into your master on the way.
• Leaving the “when to use this clause” logic in your head. If the only record of when Article 7 applies is your memory, someone has to ask you, and then wait for the answer.
• Sending a scan or PDF when you have the editable Word file. Send the version you actually edit.
• Splitting answers across three people. Three people means three slightly different answers, and another round to sort them out. Pick one contact.

FAQs about bringing your own templates to Estate Engine