Estate Planning Software for Lawyers: Enhancing Efficiency and Accuracy

Estate planning has ancient roots — but that doesn’t mean that the practice isn’t continually evolving. Modern estate planning attorneys need to leverage a host of new software tools to optimize their workflows and stay competitive in a tough market. 

Here, we’ve put together a list of 5 of the best estate planning software tools that fill in each other’s gaps and meet modern estate planning needs. These aren’t just 5 redundant tools, but 5 tools you can use together to create a comprehensive estate planning tech stack, boost your firm’s efficiency, and improve your client relationships. 

In this post, we’ll cover:

• Gavel’s powerful document automation software
• Clio’s intuitive management platform
• BlueJ L&E’s robust AI tax tool
• DocuSign’s essential e-signature collection capabilities
• Smith.ai’s useful virtual receptionist and AI voice and text services

Gavel

Best for: Client intake and document automation

Gavel’s document automation software helps estate attorneys save time and reduce errors on repetitive tasks, like document drafting and client intake. On average, attorneys using Gavel cut drafting time by 90% and save 20 hours/week, all while improving accuracy. Attorneys can use that time to focus on more complex estate planning work and practice at the top of their license. 

You can use Gavel both to automate your own proprietary legal document sets or to get up and running fast with our pre-built, no-set-up-required templates. In either case, Gavel’s powerful logic makes it easy to quickly process even the most complex estate planning documents, like living trusts and pour-over wills. Simply collect your client’s data, like names, beneficiaries, and birth and marriage dates, and let Gavel handle the rest. 

Let’s take a look at an example to get a clearer idea of what this all means. Say you’re onboarding a new client and need to draft an engagement letter for them. Without Gavel, that would typically mean gathering your client’s data and then manually going through an existing Word or PDF template and using find and replace to swap out all the variables, like names and dates — a time-consuming and error-prone process. 

But with Gavel, you can automate the document creation process. Simply set up your intake form in Gavel, and then send it to your client. When they receive it, they’ll be presented with a questionnaire:

You can use Gavel’s conditional logic capabilities to configure your form so that if the client selects “Married,” the form will change to accommodate that:

When all the information is gathered, Gavel generates a finished, perfectly formatted Word or PDF document complete with all the fields your client entered in the questionnaire:

One of the great things about Gavel is that after you set up your template the first time, you can use it ad infinitum. And if you use one of the pre-built templates, you don’t even have to go through the initial setup — they’re ready from the get-go. 

Plus, you can use Gavel’s white-labeled client portals to elevate the client experience — that’s particularly important in a legal landscape where clients increasingly expect attorneys to offer their services online.

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Gavel was purpose-built for legal document automation, going beyond basic automation to provide a powerful, fully customizable workflow solution. Unlike generalist tools with basic add-on automation features, Gavel has advanced logic and data structuring capabilities lawyers need to handle complex workflows, ensuring it remains the most powerful platform for legal document automation while being easy to set up.

If you're interested in trying out Gavel, start a risk-free, 7-day free trial (no credit card required) or schedule a personalized demo.

Clio Manage

Best for: Practice management‍

The Clio legal suite is one of the legal industry’s most popular software toolsets, used by thousands of law firms across the world. Clio Manage is the part of the suite that is specifically designed for practice management.Clio Manage helps estate attorneys in four main areas: 

• Client management: Easily collect and manage key client information, like names and birth, marriage, and death dates. You can use Gavel’s Clio integration to import this data and draft documents with it. 
• Document management: Organize important documents, like wills and trusts, and store them in secure and easily accessible cloud storage.
• Time tracking: Keep track of all your billable hours in real-time with Clio’s built-in tools. 
• Billing: Use your time-tracking data to create branded bills, and leverage Clio’s built-in payment system so your clients can pay you easily 

When you first load up Clio, you’ll be presented with the Clio dashboard:

Here, you’ll find an overview of all the tasks for the day, upcoming calendar events, and important financial and billing information for your firm. At the top right, you’ll see the timer, which you can easily switch on to make sure you don’t miss any billable hours while working within Clio. On the left side of the screen, you’ll notice several different pages that you can use to enter information into your Clio database. The contacts tab, for example, looks like this:

Any information here can be entered into various matters, like so:

Notice that the client, Sam Alword, and the responsible attorney, Andrew Booth, are both already listed in the client database from the previous screen. When they’re entered in, their data is automatically linked to the matter, so that when you visit it next time, you’ll see their phone number, address, spouse, and any other relevant information:

Although Clio’s functionality isn’t particularly complex, its simplicity makes for an intuitive yet powerful database that can make your work much easier. 

Remember that Clio integrates with Gavel, and has been acclaimed as one of Clio’s best integrations, which means that you can import your Clio client data into your Gavel documents to streamline your workflow and drafting experience. Check out our Clio integration resource to learn how. 

BlueJ L&E

Best for: Tax code questions

There can be a lot of tax considerations involved in your estate planning practice — especially when dealing with high-net-worth clients. BlueJ L&E is an AI tool that is designed to help you quickly find verifiable answers to your tax questions so you can spend less time searching around for answers and more time working with your clients.

If you’re familiar with other AI tools, like ChatGPT, this may raise some eyebrows. AI models are notorious for “hallucinations” — false information that the AI makes up. BlueJ, however, is a different breed of AI: all of its answers include tax code citations so you can easily verify their accuracy. 

For example, if you want to know the rules for determining the allocation of consideration received in an applicable asset acquisition, you can simply type in your question, and BlueJ will provide an answer:

If you read through the response, you’ll notice that the sources are linked throughout. At the bottom of the response, all those citations are laid out for easy perusal:

If you want a quick summary of the linked sources, just click the “Summarize” button to the right of them:

At the end of your research, you can have BlueJ use its generative AI features to write up a memo for financial planners, financial advisors, or your clients. 

DocuSign

Best for: E-signature collection‍

DocuSign is a staple of the legal industry, so its inclusion here shouldn’t come as much of a surprise. Chances are that you’re already using it in your practice — and if you’re not, you probably should be. 

DocuSign’s functionality is simple but powerful: it allows legal professionals to send contracts to clients and collect legally-binding e-signatures by email. DocuSign creates a comprehensive audit trail throughout, noting the identity of the signers and the date and time of each signature. Once you have the signatures you need, you can store the contract on DocuSign’s contract management platform. 

Those are the basics. But two lesser-known features of DocuSign can be helpful in the estate planning process as well: DocuSign’s Gavel integration and its AI contract analysis capabilities. 

Gavel’s DocuSign integration allows you to automatically send out a contract to all signees as soon as Gavel has finished drafting it. That means that you can have an entirely hands-off process from the initial client questionnaire to a signed contract. 

DocuSign’s AI contract analysis features come in handy when it comes to the client experience: DocuSign can automatically summarize contracts so your clients can more easily understand the wills, power of attorney agreements, and trusts that you draft for them. 

Smith.ai

Best for: Virtual receptionist

While it’s not exclusively an estate planning tool, Smith.ai’s virtual receptionists, AI voice assistants, and AI text chat can help with the client-facing portions of your firm’s operations. 

In today’s online-first world, slow responses can mean lost clients. Smith.ai empowers even small and solo firms to provide fast customer service with its 24/7 call and text handling so you don’t have to worry about losing a new client just because you’re in a meeting with another one. 

You can use Smith.ai to capture new leads, book appointments and consultations, and collect actionable data on all your calls. 

Putting it all together

When you put all these tools together, you end up with a powerful estate planning solution that covers everything from client management to document drafting that will protect your clients’ and their loved ones’ assets for years to come.