Tara (00:50):
Thank you for tuning into the Art of Estate Planning Podcast. It's your host, Tara Lucke. Today I want to talk about how to get started with the art of estate planning precedents.
(01:02):
So this is for the people listening who have invested in your new will and testamentary trust precedents and you've paid the money and you've done nothing with them. So if you have done all your work, you're up and running. You are drafting your testamentary trust wills with ease. Yo have fixed up your pricing, all of that. You can skip today if you want, you get a early mark and you are good. This is for the people who have bought the precedents, but they're still sitting in your inbox or worse, you don't even know what you did with them. So tune in, I'm going to get you sorted and the very first thing we are going to do is forgive ourselves. It's okay. These things happen all the time. Don't beat yourself up about it. Those feelings, if you have them, achieving nothing. So let it go.
(02:04):
Every day is a new day. You can start today. And I want to share a little story because you are not the only one who has done this. Actually, it was almost a year ago to the day that I'm recording this, so it was the end of financial year 2025 and one of the women who I was in an AI learned how to build AI masterclass membership programme. She is a marketing expert. So we were both in this programme and obviously everyone shares what they're doing and she's a marketing expert and I went and checked her out and she has a great Instagram and she has a membership that I think at the time it was like $7 a month. And I was like, "Oh, this is a no-brainer. I'm joining." And it was going up to $9 a month or something after the end of financial year.
(03:05):
I was like, "Great, I'm going to sign up $7 a month. I'm definitely going to get value no matter what happens out of this. " And one of the things that she includes in addition to her training and her strategy is some AI custom GPTs in ChatGPT that are trained on her system and information and knowledge and the methodology that she uses to help you with your marketing. And so full disclosure, I now use those custom GPTs to help write emails. To be fair, I end up writing them mostly myself, but they do help me to get started and they're pretty good. They are really helpful. They know my business, they're trained on that and social media captions and things when I get stuck. So I do a bit of a hybrid in terms of, I find it hard for AI to really understand the nuance of estate planning and testamentary trust.
(04:07):
So often everything is very high level. I don't usually just use the AI output. I customise it or I'll draught it or it'll just help me if I'm stuck on a particular phrasing. But anyway, I do love it. It's worth every dollar. And in fact, I'm stuck with GPT, ChatGPT instead of Clawed because I really like these GPTs so much. But anyway, I digress. I bought this package and membership from her and I think it probably took me three or four months before I did a single thing about it. I just had the welcom emails sitting in my inbox and I did nothing about it. And to be fair, it was the end of financial year. That was crazy. And then I'm pretty sure I was working on a big precedent update and some other big projects that were taking up a lot of my time.
(05:06):
And I just was like, I'm too busy to look at this and set it up. And then one afternoon, I think it was like a Thursday afternoon and I don't work Fridays. So Thursday afternoon is like my Friday and it was 4:30 or something. I had until 5:00 and I was like, "Stuff it. I am just going to look at this and see what I can do in the next 30 minutes." And do you know what? It probably took me 12 minutes to set the whole thing up. And I had been sitting on it for months, several months thinking it was too hard. It was going to not work and take up too much time and it took me less than 30 minutes. And now I'm reaping the rewards using it multiple times a week and it was super easy. So we've all been there and so we just forgive ourselves and move on.
(06:01):
I'm not no judgement . If you actually know you bought them and you can't even find them or some people who bought them before December, November 2025, the link that you have in your email might not work anymore because we actually changed our domain from Tara Lucke to the Art of Estate Planning and those links are broken for the old links. So if that's you, just send us an email at [email protected] and our incredible team, Khate or Kat, they will send you the precedents. They'll send you what you've got, the latest versions or the version you're entitled to if you're not in the TT Precedents Club and we've updated it and you can start fresh. It's no problem. So the first thing to do is make sure you have your precedents. So we circulate them as Word documents in a OneDrive folder. So go to the folder, download them.
(07:02):
I highly recommend downloading them to your document system and backing them up and calling them like the Art of Estate Planning Precedents or something and saving all of them there. You can do a bulk download that will take you 30 seconds. Get them in your system and then work out which practise management system you use and check out the instructions for setting them up. So we at the time of recording have coding in the precedents for ActionStep, Leap, Clio, and Smokeball, and we have a no coding version. So go to the folder that you have for your practise management system. And the first couple of documents that should be numbered like one will be the instructions. Now, if you use Action Step, you are in luck. You just have to click a link and it will set up the custom matter type and have the precedents preloaded.
(08:01):
That is going to take you 10 seconds, okay? If you are using the other practise management systems, it takes longer than 10 seconds, but not that long. What we recommend is that you create a custom matter type. I mean, it might be called different things in the different systems, but basically you create a new type of matter that you use as a recurring matter type each time you use an estate planning matter. And so this is going to have, if you look at the instructions, we'll tell you which of the roles or parties you need to have in there, which of the fields you need to have, which corresponds to the templates. So do that. If you've got admin support, get them to do that. And then the next step is once you've done that is uploading the templates into your precedent bank. So they come as editable Word documents as you probably know.
(09:00):
So you might like to take two approaches. First, you could just get someone in your team or do it yourself to change this, bring it up to branding for you. So put in your logo if that's what you do, change the font if you've got a firm font. We have everything set up with document styles. So if you change it in the document styles and update all, it should be really simple. So you can do that and get them looking and feeling like your brand, or you can just play around with them first. Then get them uploaded in your system. I honestly think making the custom matter type and uploading them, that should only take 30 minutes max, even less if you've got a really good admin team who can do it. And what I want you to do is just play around. I give you permission to play around with them.
(09:56):
You have to just get stuck in and I promise you it is not anywhere near as hard or overwhelming or scary as you think. And it will then take you less than three minutes to generate your will. So I want you to play around. Create a will for yourself. Set up a testing matter where you're the test data. Yo probably need to update your will anyway. Regenerate your will, especially if you already do have your will. Then you can sort of compare, look at the one you've got, look at ours, see how they work, how they are different. It won't take you very long to generate it, but you might need to print it out and look at it and just read it and get a feel for it. But I promise you doing that work will reap so many dividends because once you do it, you're going to realise it's not as overwhelming, it's easy to read, to get your way around it.
(10:54):
It's your roadmap and you'll get your bearings in the document and it's really not as overwhelming or scary. I think if you set aside two hours, on quiet day, block it out in your calendar, no phone calls, no meetings. I don't know, do something nice, get a chocolate bar, make a cup of tea, light a candle, whatever you need to do. By the end of the two hours, you will be all across everything and it is going to then save you hours of time once you've got everything up and running. So depending on your policy, I would also suggest practise makes perfect and use the precedence for any staf members that you have, any family members, any friends. If you do offer estate planning to them, ask them if they can be your guinea pig so that you can actually put them through the whole workflow from start to beginning.
(11:59):
This is especially, I think, if you are brand new to estate planning. So you're probably going to fall into two camps, either on you're already preparing testamentary trust wills at some point and you're upgrading your precedent. And if that's the case, really all you need to do is get it going in your system and be comfortable with our document. Also, you can change the text in our document. If you have particular clauses you really like, if you think we have something that's in the clause library that you want in your will every time, go for broke, customise it. My drafting methodology is really trying to create a precedent that suits 80% of clients, that 80 / 20 rule. A lot of the time we drag in things from the clause library when we need it for a custom client. But if you want it in there, it's totally up to you.
(12:59):
There's no right or wrong. I want you to be empowered to customise these as well. That said, if you're new to estate planning and you don't have these strong preferences, the precedents are perfect. You don't need to change anything either. So if you're new to estate planning or you've been doing basic wills and you want to upgrade to testamentary trust, practise makes perfect. So that's where I would say, because it's not just the will, it's the whole workflow and you sort of getting used to the conversations and when to raise things. So that's when I would say, try and get some Guinea pig clients who are going to be a little bit forgiving on any clunkiness in your process. So that's where I would say if you've got a team member in your firm, do it for yourself, do it for your family members, subject to your policy on that.
(13:57):
Maybe don't do it for your parents if there's a chance that could be a challenge, but you're for your siblings or that type of thing where you are not a beneficiary or involved in the estate plan, maybe only as a backup and then get used to it, play, practise, see how it works. I'm just going to take a pause there. I want you to hear from one of our members, Mike, about his experience in starting his firm and the art of estate planning resources.
Michael (14:25):
Hey, it's Michael McClaus, founder and principal lawyer and director of Latitude Legal Group. I want to talk to you about the art of estate planning TT Precedents Group and why it has been so successful for me. When I started my firm, I knew that I wanted to bring in an estate planning practise to compliment my business and commercial practise in particular. And having not practised in estate planning law for around 10 years, largely when I was a junior, like a lot of lawyers do as a junior, dabble in both planning and administration, it had been a while. I needed to hit the ground running quickly, get up to speed on the current law. And when I discovered Tara Lucke's TT Precedent's Club, that was the game changer for me. It allowed me to scale up my estate planning practise from zero to taking on clients and confidently delivering simple to complex testamentary discussionary trust wills in a matter of months.
(15:32):
The online tutorial information is excellent. The resources are excellent. The white label precedents and marketing tools and everything that the The Art of Estate Planning TT Precedents Club provides a practitioner just really facilitate what would otherwise take years to create and to curate and put together. This way it was buy off the shelf, put your branding on it, work it into your practise management system, work it into your workflows and off you are to the races. It's been absolutely fantastic. I highly recommend it if you're considering it.
Tara (16:11):
All right, so we're back and I want to talk to you about some resources that we had that I really want you to lean on when starting with your precedence. So firstly, I know there's a lot of emails you get and a lot of information to process, but in your email that you get with the precedents, you'll see there's a link to the Art of Estate Planning portal. So that's where we have our library of frequently asked question videos and there are so many videos in there that you can watch to guide you. And so they cover off the actual how to like, how do I set these up in the system? How do I change this type of thing? How do I create a mutual mirror image will for a spouse? How do I use the Global Replace if you don't have coding? All of that.
(17:02):
But they also have a section in there with all of the technical questions. So if you are like, "I need a special disability trust in this will, how do I adapt it? How does your gift over work? How does the Family Law Disqualification event work? How are the beneficiaries classed? How do I exclude a beneficiary?" All of these things like that, that you are not the only person asking. If someone has asked before, we've centralised those questions and put them in a video. Now, the videos are not as polished as our online course because a lot of them are snippets from our TT Precedents Club Hot Seat questions, but they are so useful. They're really useful. So I want you to watch those. A lot of them are really short, just a couple of minutes. You don't have to watch every video, but at least have a look, log in and have a look and see what's in there so that you have in the back of your mind, "Oh, there's probably a video on this.
(18:04):
" Those videos are really going to help you, especially if you've drafting and you've got questions, it might raise things that you weren't alert to in terms of drafting strategy. We also have two other resources, the TT Precedents Club Membership. So that's a month to month membership. I'm sure if you're listening to the podcast, you will have heard me go on about it and how incredible it is. And not only is it an amazing supportive community where we give you updates to the precedents and I also keep you up to date on changes to the law and we do deep dive trainings. But every Thursday at 1:00 PM AEST, we have a live Zoom meeting and you, if you're part of the membership can submit your questions to me and the group where we will do things like review your client strategy, draught clauses for you, review your clause drafting, research questions for you and we will hold your hand as you get used to your precedence.
(19:10):
So if you have a question, say, you can literally say, keep the clients anonymous, but you can basically go, I've got a couple, this is the demographic, how many kids they've got, any relationship issues we need to be aware of, here's their assets, how should I draught the will? What is the strategy I should consider? Are there any tricky questions or issues I should tackle, need to be alert to that type of thing. So make sure you use us. Join the TT Precedents Club if you're feeling that you need some support or some handholding, it is exactly what it's designed for. There is no such thing as a silly question. We have everybody in there with such a broad range of experience. We have people brand new to estate planning. We've got early career lawyers. We've got lawyers who are experienced in another area of law and are upskilling in estate planning.
(20:07):
We've got accredited specialists, people with masters in estate planning, the full spectrum and no question is silly. You also learn a lot by osmosis just listening to what other people are asking and thinking about. You get multiple perspectives. It's not just me answering questions. It's all the support you need. So don't be shy about using that. And then the extra resource we have is our online course, Testamentary Trust, the Essential Guide for Australian Lawyers. So I actually think everybody needs that course. It's so powerful and I mean, I know I say that and I made it, but it is literally like a brain dump of everything that I know about testamentary trust and have learned from eight years of writing the precedents. And it's almost 18 years that I've been admitted as a lawyer. So all of that experience working in estate planning and focusing on testamentary trust is in the course but in a very structured cohesive way.
(21:18):
So we really start with laying the foundation and then we keep building. So we keep building on our foundational concepts, very practical. There's actual clauses in there where I'm like, "This clause does this. " This clause does that. See the difference. We talk about strategy, when to use different strategies and the drafting options in the precedent for different client demographics. It's so practical. It's like a beautiful mix of theory and practical. And the awesome thing is as well, compared to a textbook is that it's up-to-date and current. So compared to a textbook that is frozen in time, that course, you get lifetime access to it. So it's the best way to keep your knowledge up to date. And also it's a really good way to train your team as well on testamentary trust. So outsource that training to the course and the programme. And I think collectively with the precedents, with the membership, the TT Precedents Club, you watch the video FAQ and then if you want more knowledge about testamentary trust, get the course that will really give you a solid foundation for testamentary trusts.
(22:41):
But I just want you to know it's not as intimidating as it seems and it's okay that you haven't done anything with your precedence yet. It's absolutely okay. I would also just give you some time to play around in the portal, check what you've got access to in there. So go to your library and you'll see, have a look what's in there. The other thing I will say with the portal is you can actually watch it on your phone. So we've got an app. The very first lesson in a lot of the resources in the portal is how to watch the modules on your phone. I love doing that. I use Kajabi to host the course and I have other courses where I'm a customer that use Kajabi and I love just I'll be cooking dinner, cleaning up, doing the washing, folding the laundry, working out, and I'll just be listening on my phone.
(23:44):
And that's a great way to just get that knowledge in your ears and keep that continual learning going. But yeah, if you have any questions once you get into the precedence, don't hesitate to ask because we will either I'll create a video for you. We can talk about it in the hot seat or I'll say, great, we've already got a resource on this. Here you go. If you've got any questions, check back in after you've watched the video and we really do want you to feel supported when you're using your precedence. It's not like a, okay, you bought them and you're on your own, see you later type service. I want you to feel like you know what you're doing, you're confident, they work for you. And if you do have any questions, that really helps us as well in terms of new resources and training we need to make.
(24:39):
The other thing is we have over 700 law firms testing them around Australia and that is incredible because when you ask questions and let me know what you're getting stuck on or you're not sure if there's precedent suit a particular scenario, I take all of that and build it into our precedent update programme and schedule. We factor it in and we keep learning from what the community is doing with the precedents as well. Okay. I hope this episode has given you some confidence and comfort to set aside some time, get stuck in. It is nowhere near as scary or intimidating or as lengthy as you are worried about. I believe in you. You can totally do it. Good things are on the other side and you're ready. It's your time. Take that first step. Thanks so much for your support and I look forward to seeing you in the podcast next week.
