Stop Losing Money: Efficiency Tips for Estate Planning Lawyers
In this blog post, I share my top tips for estate planning lawyers who want to maximise the profit on their matters.
Not only does being more efficient in your estate planning matters result in more profit for your firm, but it also creates better estate planning outcomes and value for your clients.
Here are our efficiency tips for estate planning lawyers:
1. Integrated Precedents
Precedents that integrate seamlessly with your practice management system are essential law firm resources that pay for themselves almost immediately.
At The Art of Estate Planning, we offer Testamentary Trust Precedent Packages. Our testamentary trust and basic will precedents are up to date with current legislation and case law, and integrate with practice management systems such as Actionstep, Smokeball, and LEAP.
Getting bogged down in checking client details over and over throughout a single document is a poor use of your talents and skills, and it makes it difficult to shift your mindset towards strategy and contingency planning, pulling you away from the high-level work where you truly add value.
Leveraging precedents that integrate into your practice management system eliminates the risk of errors such as misspelled names, inconsistent details throughout the documents, and incorrect addresses. This frees you to spend more time focusing on the things that add value to your clients – like estate planning strategy, communication with clients, and identifying risk issues.
Prefer to listen instead? Check out Episode #9 and Episode #10 of The Art of Estate Planning Podcast, where we share our best tips on how to help your estate planning practice thrive.
2. Precedent Automation
As The Art of Estate Planning’s Testamentary Trust Precedents integrate with your practice management system, you can simply tick a few boxes, and the correct clauses will automatically populate into your client’s will, minimising the risk of drafting errors and strategy mistakes.
For instance, our precedents with Actionstep and Smokeball coding will ask:
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How many testamentary trusts are you establishing?
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Is the testamentary trust for the benefit of the surviving spouse, or does it only commence once both spouses have died?
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How are you handling foreign beneficiaries? Are they included or excluded?
By simply selecting a radio button or a dropdown menu, you can produce a completed testamentary trust will in less than 3 minutes, containing every clause you need.
This automation prevents errors, allowing you to focus on high-level strategy, giving you time for longer meetings with your clients, or more time with your family. Because the core drafting is handled by the precedents, you are free to dive deeper into your client strategy, giving you more time in meetings to guide deeper discussions.
3. Clause Library
There is no need to keep reinventing the wheel.
In the TT Precedents Club, we have a 100+ page will drafting Clause Library for our members, which is full of common and bespoke clauses for wills, cover letters and letters of wishes. It includes an index and is highly searchable.
What I love about the Clause Library is how our members can leverage the shared knowledge of our TT Precedents Club members, with the clauses being drafted in response to our members’ requests, client scenarios, and members also contributing their own clauses.
A perfect example is our “Right to Occupy” clause. The Clause Library contains six different variations of the clause, to reflect whether the clause is needed in a basic will or a testamentary trust will, and whether the property passes to the trust immediately or remains in the estate until the right to occupy ends.
Our Clause Library is a living document, and we amend and add new clauses every week based on the feedback and needs of our TT Precedents Club members.
4. Testamentary Trusts
I am a firm believer that adding testamentary trusts to your service offering is the key to a profitable estate planning practice, provided you pair them with reliable automated precedents that integrate with your practice management system.
Most clients have a good understanding of how a basic will works (i.e. leaving assets to a spouse and then children), however many have never heard of testamentary trusts or the value they can add to their legacy planning.
It is your role to educate your clients on the power a testamentary trust can add to their estate plan, how it works, and ultimately empower them to decide if it is the right solution for them.
Testamentary Trusts: The Key to "Upleveling"
When you start offering testamentary trusts to your clients, the entire tone of the matter changes.
A basic will is not a "feel-good" process for clients. How many times have you heard a client say “I don’t care, I’ll be dead anyway”. Spending money on a basic will is less than exciting.
However, when you add testamentary trusts into the equation, the conversation shifts to creating an intergenerational legacy. You start discussing the protection of wealth for children, grandchildren, nieces, nephews, and loved ones for generations to come. This shifts the conversation from a death-focused document to a bigger plan that is positive and empowering.
Testamentary Trusts: Price Becomes a Non-Issue
One of the lawyers in our TT Precedents Club membership, Kirsty Rayner, shared feedback with me that perfectly demonstrates the power of adding testamentary trusts into your estate planning conversation. After introducing testamentary trusts into her service offering, her experience has become that once a client understands the protection that a testamentary trust provides, price becomes nearly irrelevant.
Clients become so invested in this future plan that they understand and accept the value provided by the testamentary trusts. When you consider the future tax savings and asset protection benefits, the investment in a will containing a testamentary trust is excellent value for money.
Conversely, if you only offer basic wills, it is very easy for clients to "shop around" and cherry-pick based on price, struggling to see any real difference in value between your professional service and an online provider or the lawyer down the street (other than price).
5. Pricing Skills and Cost Agreement Protection
Once you introduce testamentary trusts into your service offering, you will need to revisit your prices, especially for your testamentary trust wills.
If you are unsure how to price your services, we hear you. Pricing skills are often the most difficult of the non-legal business skills we need to master.
At The Art of Estate Planning, we have developed the Estate Planning Pricing Toolkit.
It includes over 2 hours of training on value pricing, a comparison of what our TT Precedents Club members are charging and my recommendations for key business decisions like whether to use a price list or bespoke pricing, whether to publish prices on your website and how to package up your wills with power of attorney and letter of wishes documents.
Not only does it include training on how to calculate the right price for your firm, the Estate Planning Pricing Toolkit helps to protect your firm from issues that can eat into your matter profitability. The toolkit includes over 15 pages of precedent terms to incorporate into your client cost agreement template specific to estate planning matters, setting out a process and additional fees for when things go wrong (e.g. lost documents, clients signing in the wrong place, requests for certified copies etc.)
Where are the leakages in your firm's profit margins? Many of these can be prevented with clear communication in your cost agreement.
When a task arises that is outside the original fee scope, it can be tempting for lawyers to absorb the cost rather than discussing it with the client and recouping the cost from the client, especially when you feel like you are on the back foot because it is not addressed in your costs disclosure.
When was the last time you reviewed your own cost agreement? You likely have not read it in years. Clear communication is kind; it makes things easier for your clients. It is worth reviewing your cost agreement to ensure your firm is protected by setting out clearly who is responsible for specific disbursements and out-of-scope work.
6. Upsell Family Trust Succession, Powers of Attorney, BDBNs, and Letters of Wishes
I am a firm believer in increasing a client's average spend by offering your existing clients additional must-have services – it results in a win-win for you and the clients.
Consider the cost of client acquisition, every time you take on a new client, there is a cost attached. Even if you have not quantified it, every new lead costs your firm money whether it is directly through paid advertising or indirectly through devoting your time to networking activities and fostering referral relationships.
If you can increase the average spend of your existing clients, your firm becomes significantly more profitable.
Offering value-adding solutions such as family trust succession, powers of attorney for trading entities, BDBNs for self-managed super funds, and letters of wishes make perfect sense - it aligns with the work you are already doing for the clients and addresses a genuine client need for a comprehensive estate plan.
You can see our precedent solutions for these value-adding services at www.theartofestateplanning.com.au/shop
Shop Now7. Diagrams
The famous saying that a picture tells a thousand words is powerful for a reason. In an area of law like estate planning where the key focus is getting the right assets to the right people at the right time, mapping out a diagrammatical distribution of the estate assets can bring your clients so much clarity and really aid to reduce the overwhelm from all the lengthy documents.
I remember the first time I was asked to create an estate planning flowchart by my supervising partner. The diagram I prepared was extremely ugly and hard to follow, and I was given some firm feedback to make it more aesthetically pleasing. At the time, I thought, "I’m a lawyer, not a graphic designer," but I did as I was asked.
I have since had a total 180-degree shift in mindset. Every client needs an estate planning flowchart diagram setting out where their assets will pass on different events, and who will control their testamentary trusts.
You cannot underestimate the powerful impact of presenting a visual representation of their will to a client. Diagrams help clients get on board with how a testamentary trust works and help them identify what might be missing.
The estate planning flowcharts are also helpful for you. In the event there are delays in the matter, or the client comes back to you for an estate planning update in the future, you will be able to get up to speed in just a few minutes by reviewing the estate planning flowchart.
At The Art of Estate Planning, we include estate planning diagram templates for you to use in “The Works” precedent package, simplifying the process of creating these powerful tools.
8. Automated File Notes and Meeting Agendas
While each client is unique, there are steps in the estate planning workflow that are the same every time: from documenting the instructions obtained and advice given in the meetings in a comprehensive file note, through to reviewing the background material, and preparing your recommendations. These steps are critical for risk management (especially on an audit!) but that does not mean that you need to reinvent the process every time.
Our Art of Estate Planning will precedents include sophisticated meeting agenda and file note templates containing strategic decision trees and risk management tips that integrate with your practice management system, so you are not spending hours preparing and documenting each client meeting.
9. Newsletters
Estate Planning is a unique area of law in that there is often a long lead time before a prospect considers working with you and the time that they actually take action and sign the costs agreement.
A prospect needs to hear from you on at least seven different occasions before going ahead. The "Rule of 7" is a marketing principle rooted in the idea that a prospect needs to encounter a brand’s message at least seven times before they take action. This concept dates back to the 1930s golden age of Hollywood, where studio heads realized that cinemagoers needed to be exposed to a movie's promotion seven times before they were convinced to go buy a ticket.
In our TT Precedents Club membership, the firms that are most profitable do not wait for prospects to find them at the time of an emergency.
Instead, they build automated marketing systems that put their firm front of mind for prospective clients over and over, so that they build trust and familiarity with them.
The end result is that by the time the prospective client is actually ready to take action for their estate plan – they have already made up their mind about which firm they will work with, and it is only a matter of when they will start the process.
A great way to do this is to send a monthly newsletter. By maintaining a mailing list of everyone who interacts with your firm online or makes an inquiry, and emailing them once a month with estate planning tips and personal stories, you will ensure you stay "front of mind”. By the time they commit to working with you, they already feel like they know you.
Estate planning is such a rich topic; you can easily weave in your personal experiences and philosophies.
Even a simple reminder to those who have not yet accepted a cost agreement can be a nudge for them to take action. If you are not sending emails or newsletters, you are missing the chance to stay visible to your prospective clients.
10. Simpler Signing
Some readers may disagree, but I believe wills should be signed on the last page only. Signing on every single page is an outdated convention from the days when we lacked the technology for easy binding and scanning. This process arises in every estate planning matter but when was the last time you stopped and reviewed whether your will binding and signing process was done in the most efficient manner?
There is no Australian legislation mandating that a will must be signed on every page. While some worry about being questioned at the Registry, remember that even many "homemade" wills are granted probate. If your binding method is secure, your signing process can be significantly simplified.
Curious about some other ways to approach will binding and signing? Check out my video on
how to get your wills bound.
11. Flyers
Leveraging beautifully designed and plain-English flyers is a powerful way to empower clients and prospective clients to become familiar with complex legal concepts.
For example, if a client needs a power of attorney for their trading entity, a short two-page flyer can explain why they need it, what happens to their business if they do not have one in place, and gives them a tangible resource they can take away and consider.
If your firm’s flyers are professionally branded, they strengthen your sales position and serve as a lasting reminder for the client. They also help us move away from "legalese" and communicate on the clients’ level.
The Art of Estate Planning precedent packages include white-labelled flyers in Word and Canva that you can customise with your firm’s branding guide and logo and use directly with your clients.
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