6 Tips for Simplifying Estate Planning Decisions for Clients

In estate planning, there is an innate tension between the timing expectations of clients and lawyers.

It is not uncommon for a client to take many weeks or months to make the key decisions required of them during the estate planning process. On the other hand, from a risk and profit management perspective, it is best for the law firm to have the estate plan completed within a short time frame, for instance, less than a month.

As estate planning lawyers, we have to try our best to speed up the process, while simultaneously recognising that estate planning is a confronting and often emotional process for clients. We also have to respect the nature of the decision-making process for clients. For many clients, they may only need to make these decisions a handful of times during their life, and the nature of the decisions carries enormous gravity.

Here are 6 tips on simplifying estate planning decisions for clients:

1. Put Yourself, a Friend, or a Relative Through the Estate Planning Process

Stress test your estate planning workflow and customer journey to identify the logistical barriers and areas where you can offer more support and guidance.

One of the best ways to test your estate planning workflow and customer experience is to have yourself, a close friend, or a family member experience your firm’s estate planning process.

This will help bring to light any bottlenecks or areas where clients are confused or need additional support. This feedback is vital for streamlining the customer journey and making it as smooth as possible.

There is already a natural inertia that arises in estate planning, so minimising any unnecessary bumps in your process is vital.

2. Optimise Your Information for Different Learning Styles

The estate planning process involves many complex concepts that clients are being presented with for the first time.

It can be immensely helpful to prime your clients with information in advance of your client meetings, to help them understand these concepts and learn about them in different formats so they are not overwhelmed by all the new information you are giving them in the meeting.

For instance, sharing an explanatory video and/or plain-English flyer with diagrams in advance can help clients gain a "head start" on the meeting and support them to start thinking about their instructions and wishes. Using different formats can also appeal to the different learning styles of your clients.

3. Simplify Your Instruction Sheet

Lawyers love instruction sheets, and in an ideal world, the client would be able to complete an instruction sheet with all the exact information that you need to include in the estate planning documents so that you can integrate the instruction sheet data with your practice management system and automatically populate your perfect, error-free estate planning draft documents.

And that is how many of the low-cost online will providers work.

But there is a reason why the majority of Australians do not have a valid will in place. Many get stuck in the decision-making phase, and this inertia stops them from moving forward with their estate plan.

A big value-add that law firms can bring to the estate planning process that differentiates themselves from the online will providers is to guide and support clients through the decision-making process.

Despite the estate planning precedents requiring lots of different information and data, I have a tried and true strategy to help draw out the initial decisions from clients in a simple way.

If you really look at the nature of the instructions we need, you can break those instructions into four functional decisions:

1. Beneficiaries: Who should receive your assets when you die?

2. Guardians for Minor Children: If you have minor children, who will look after them if both you and your partner die?

3. Financial Controllers: Who will control your finances if you die or lose capacity?

4. Medical Decision Makers: Who makes medical decisions for you if you are incapacitated?

Filling in one piece of double-sided paper (especially if it is over a glass of wine and a cheese plate) can feel much more manageable and less overwhelming than a 10-page instruction sheet chasing every specific detail.

4. Extrapolate Instructions from Four Questions

Simplifying the process into four key decisions can really help get some initial clarity on the clients’ instructions, and then allows you as the lawyer to gently guide them to fill in the remaining instruction gaps (e.g. planning for different contingencies).

Once you have the basic instructions set out, the client will feel like they have made some great progress.

You can then follow up with additional questions and guidance, such as: Do they want to build in "checks and balances" for the financial controllers, or do they trust them implicitly? What if they die or lose capacity?

Discussing these types of scenarios in a meeting after you already have a clear picture of their general view for their estate planning instructions can help you pick out the gaps in their instructions and help them to focus in on their wishes for particular scenarios, simplifying the instruction-taking process.

5. Liaise with Professional Advisers

If your client has a team of professional advisers, such as an accountant and/or financial adviser, it can significantly streamline the customer experience if you collaborate and work with those advisers (with the client’s permission) to obtain information regarding insurance policies, superannuation details, trust deeds, company records, and financial statements.

Rather than relying on the client to dig around for this paperwork, liaising with their professional advisers helps your firm collate all necessary information behind the scenes without burdening the client. An additional possible benefit is the material is often likely to be more accurate and current! 

6. Use an Effective Cost Agreement

Unlike other legal matters, estate planning is usually not urgent (or at least until it really becomes urgent!).

A client might embark on the process during a surge of energy for sorting out their life admin, but then lose momentum, causing the process to drag on for months as their attention shifts to more pressing demands on their time.

A well-structured cost agreement can protect you in the event of client delay.

For instance, your costs agreement should put a time limit on the validity of any fixed pricing, and specify that final instructions are required within, for example, 30 days. It can also set out the expectations or time limits for booking signing meetings, and returning signed documents.

You can also specify that after a certain period, the firm has the right to close the file, or that extensions will incur additional fees.

Clear terms make expectations transparent. If the client reads the agreement, they know exactly what is expected of them.