Being an estate planning lawyer is demanding.
You need to stay up to date on the latest legal developments. You need to keep your clients happy. You need to find ways to generate new leads and clients consistently. And while you're doing all this, you'll be practically overwhelmed with estate planning documents to draft, review, and finalize.
Creating documents, like wills, trusts, power of attorney documents, and other contracts, is one of the biggest and most time-consuming responsibilities of your profession.
Now, thanks to AI, estate planning is easier than ever before.
But how exactly can AI assist with estate planning document drafting?
Estate planning lawyers and law firms need to draft a multitude of different documents, including things like:
· Wills and trusts.
· Power of attorney.
· Healthcare power of attorney.
· Beneficiary designations.
· Letter of intent.
· Guardianship designations.
Even if you're generally working with templates and taking advantage of delegation, shortcuts, and other time-saving strategies, this is a lot of work.
It's:
· Tedious. You didn't get your law degree and start practicing so that you could write out the same types of contracts, over and over. This work is tedious and repetitive, and so much so that even people who thrive on simple and repetitive tasks can eventually find themselves overwhelmed.
· Time consuming. At the same time, this work is very time-consuming. Even if you're an expert with many years of experience, there's an upper limit to how fast you can produce these documents in a responsible manner. You might be able to rush through the process, but doing so increases the risk of making critical mistakes – some of which could be interpreted as malpractice.
· Expensive. If you decide to delegate this work to other people, it's going to be expensive. You need talented, qualified people to produce documents on behalf of your law firm, and those talented, qualified people demand high salaries.
Accordingly, estate planning lawyers tend to get excited at the prospect of streamlining the process.
How exactly does AI document drafting work?
Essentially, it means utilizing a generative AI engine to produce a document according to the specifications you provide. Generative AI engines come in many forms, with many possible specialties; some are designed for general queries and can be used for almost anything, while others are highly specialized and exceptionally effective at producing specific types of documents.
Legal AI typically utilizes the following to allow lawyers and law firms to generate drafts of documents much faster.
· Pattern recognition. At the heart of most generative AI engines is a sophisticated system of pattern recognition. Legal AI engines study existing contracts and other legal documents, as well as case information, to identify linguistic and formatting patterns and replicate those patterns in response to user prompts.
· NLP. Natural language processing (NLP) is a discipline within the umbrella of artificial intelligence (AI), focusing on both understanding and replicating natural language patterns. In the upper echelons of AI tools, generative AI engines can practically “understand” almost any naturally written sentence – and produce endless comprehensible sentences according to user prompts.
· Automated data extraction. Some AI engines are also designed to automate and streamline data extraction from specific sources, such as legal libraries. This can help you expedite the research process and give you meaningful data you need to produce better estate planning documents.
· Prompt analysis. Also, most modern generative AI engines are equipped with advanced prompt analysis tools, making it much easier for these systems to comprehend and address prompts from users. Even if you have limited experience with AI, you should be able to design prompts capable of getting you the types of documents you need.
When utilized properly, AI and the best estate planning software tools can greatly accelerate your estate planning document drafting.
You can use AI to do research, outline various documents, produce first drafts of documents, and even review documents that you've created on your own.
The first and arguably hardest step of the process is to choose a legal AI system that's going to work for your estate planning law practice needs. Once you have that in place, you can start practicing the basics of prompt engineering, and eventually refine your skills so that you can produce estate planning documents on the fly.
Even if you still spend significant time and effort on creating and polishing estate planning documents in your legal practice, utilizing AI can save you hours of time. It can spare you countless tedious tasks and document drafting headaches, and it generally supports a more efficient, profitable practice.
There are some limitations associated with AI for estate planning document drafting, however.
It pays to be aware of them.
· Accuracy. Unfortunately, AI isn't perfect. Because generative AI engines primarily draw data from other sources and prioritize pattern recognition, AI hallucinations exist; it's not uncommon for legal AI engines to occasionally present fabricated facts as reality.
If you're not paying close attention, you could easily mistake these fabrications for being real, putting both your practice and your clients in jeopardy. At this point, we can't rely on AI to be perfectly accurate all the time.
· Technical details. Similarly, generative AI engines sometimes struggle with technical details. Remember, the heart of most generative AI is a combination of natural language processing and pattern recognition; the AI doesn't truly understand complex law topics, nor is it an expert that can give legitimate legal advice.
· Legitimacy. The question of AI generated contract legitimacy is a difficult one to answer. So far, AI generated documents have been treated as somewhat indistinguishable from human generated counterparts, provided they've been written in a legally sound way – and that all signatories understand the document fully.
In short, AI generated documents are subject to the same constraints that human generated ones are – but there's a chance that may change in the future.
· Ethical issues. Some estate planning lawyers and law firms also struggle with the ethical issues related to AI. Can you use legal AI while confidently protecting your clients’ privacy and personal information? Is it your legal obligation to disclose your use of AI?
These are complicated questions to answer, and they haven't been fully sorted out by legal ethical authorities. If you want to maximize your chances of success and minimize risks, it's important for you to proactively recognize potential ethical issues and find ways to address them or avoid them.
There's no question that legal AI is an incredible time saving, efficiency maximizing tool for creating and managing estate planning documents.
However, there are some guiding principles you should follow to maintain your professional integrity, minimize risk, and ultimately serve your clients better:
· Be the primary authority. It's inadvisable and potentially even irresponsible to treat your legal AI as a paralegal, a junior lawyer, or worse, a peer in the legal industry. Instead, you need to remain the primary legal authority in the relationship and treat your legal AI only as a secondary assistant.
The AI doesn't truly understand anything, nor is it a legal expert; you must retain your position as captain and director when using this type of tool.
· Review the terms of use. Also be sure to review the terms of use very closely when considering the adoption of a new AI tool in your practice.
Pay especially close attention to how this company handles user data – and any restrictions or limitations in how the AI can be used in a commercial setting. The better you understand the tool, the better you’ll be able to use it.
· Guard client privacy. Next, make sure you continue to guard client privacy. In addition to making sure you understand the risks associated with each AI tool you use, it's your responsibility to ensure your client data remains protected.
· Disclose your use. If you do decide to use AI in your estate planning legal practice, proactively disclose your use to all relevant parties. It's an excellent way to preserve your integrity and increase transparency with your clients. This is also a good way to protect yourself from any ethical issues that might arise in the future.
· Check and finalize all details. There's nothing wrong with using AI for document drafting, nor is there anything wrong with using AI to check your work. However, you owe it to your clients and to your professional integrity to check and validate all details in the documents you create before finalizing any of them. This way, you can catch any mistakes or errors before it’s too late.
Legal AI is a transformative technology, and it's only going to become more advanced in the years to come. If you want to keep pace with your competitors, and serve your clients better, the time to Start learning and using this technology is now.
If you’re ready to give it a try for yourself, sign up for a free trial of our legal AI today!
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