Offer a better probate experience through automation

Probate is an area of the law that comes with a heavy emotional burden. Generally, your clients will have suffered a loss, and the last thing you want to do is add to the emotional toll by complicating the administration of an estate.

That means probate law requires great people skills, like many areas of the legal profession. But with so many documents to deal with, including court forms, reports, medical records, real estate deeds, and lists of assets, it also requires phenomenal attention to detail.

You need lots of information from your client to make sure the decedent’s estate is administered properly. This is an area of probate law that you can easily streamline through automation software like Gavel.

Gavel is a software platform that allows you to create workflows to collect information that, when completed, will automatically create legal forms, agreements, documents, and whatever else you need. You can embed legal guidance, explanations, info bubbles, and even videos in your questionnaires to ensure you capture all the client information you'll need. Gavel lets you build a Turbotax for probate law, cutting down on the time you spend gathering information and entering data so you can focus on your client relationship.

Probate automation lets you automatically generate court petitions, inventory lists, and everything else you need for your case. This new technology is revolutionizing the legal industry by allowing you to spend more billable hours on client service and client communication and less on document creation. Let's take a look at how Gavel can transform your practice of law.

Probate requires going through the court, which means protocol has to be followed perfectly. You need to ensure that the right people are notified of the estate administration and that the right people get their inheritance while the decedent's wishes are followed as closely as possible. Whether you are representing the decedent, personal representatives, or heirs, you must ensure you maintain perfect accuracy with your documents and file them with the court promptly.

That's exactly where Gavel can help.

‍Create an intake workflow to ask clients and interested parties all the right questions while hiding the irrelevant ones. Gavel’s customizable questionnaires use conditional logic to show only the questions you need to ask. So, for instance, during intake, your client will only be asked for children's names and dates of birth if they have already confirmed that they have children. This makes the questionnaire quicker for them to complete and more accurate for you. If the answer to the initial question is ‘no,’ then the client never sees the questions about children’s names and dates of birth.  Further, sometimes, a client may misunderstand a question and provide incorrect information or need extra guidance on a few questions. Sending a simple questionnaire could result in insufficient information and additional follow-up while sending a comprehensive questionnaire could overwhelm the client. Gavel helps mitigate these pitfalls as it is a dynamic workflow that expands or contracts based on the previous responses.

‍Create a workflow with multiple outputs to ensure that all the documents you need at a given stage get generated and not forgotten. You can use the answers in the questionnaire to create multiple documents depending on what you need for your probate case.

‍Reduce errors. Repetitive data entry can often lead to the multiplication of mistakes. Gavel eliminates these by using one primary source of information to populate all your documents. You can get the information you need from new questionnaires or use our artificial intelligence tool, Blueprint, to create questionnaires based on your existing templates. You can also pull existing information from case management software like Clio to improve your document management practices and ensure that no information slips through the cracks. 

‍Reduce time spent drafting. Gavel can help your law practice management by reducing the time you spend drafting documents and giving you more time to build client relationships. Use our groundbreaking legal technology to gather all the client data you need and reduce the time-consuming tasks often involved with probate cases.

Gavel gives you:

Gavel has a range of features that make it ideal for your probate practice:
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Gavel has helped many law firms transform how they operate in various practice areas.

For instance, Troyer & Good has used Gavel to significantly reduce the time they spend drafting estate planning documents. Gavel's streamlined user experience lets partner Tracy Troyer create custom questionnaires and transform them into legal documents like wills, trusts, and powers of attorney.

“You don’t have to have a law degree to complete [the forms] . . . you don’t need to know what per stirpes means . . . and that was a big thing about Gavel that was appealing,” says Troyer.

In a study of 50 lawyers in estate planning, family law, and corporate law, we found that Gavel reduced the time they spent drafting documents by 90%.

‍Gavel has helped law firms:

There are lots of ways automation can improve your probate practice. Here are some ideas:

Probate law can be very complex, which makes it an ideal candidate for automation. Gavel can remove a significant amount of the time drafting routine paperwork from the probate law process, allowing you to focus on better serving your clients. With automated document generation, secure client portals, and AI-enhanced data gathering, you can quickly move your case through probate, enhancing client satisfaction. Book a free trial of Gavel today to see how it can revolutionize your practice.