How to Ensure Your Estate Planning Practice Can Never Be Replaced by AI

By: Ali Katz1 NEW LAW BUSINESS MODEL

As we all know by now, AI is getting more and more powerful every day. Up until recently, it didn’t seem like a real threat. However, today chatGPT is creating content that’s sometimes even better than human created content, and certainly much faster. This is a problem for Estate Planning Lawyers, who generate much of their revenue from document preparation, at least if you do estate planning the traditional way. In a year or two, a client will be able to go online, interact with their AI, and say: “Draft me a trust.” The AI will ask a series of questions and put together everything the client needs.

Within the next 3-5 years, most clients won’t need an Attorney who only provides documents or even an attorney who sells documents plus financial products. Clients will be able to run numbers, create documents and buy insurance and make investments on their own. So, what can the smart and savvy Estate Planning Lawyer do to ensure they can never be replaced by AI? The solution is to provide an innovative, high-value service that can never be replaced by technology, but that uses technology to create so much efficiency for you that you can focus on the parts of your law practice that rely on your heart and soul to deliver.

Don’t Compete with DIY Solutions - Do This Instead

You do not need to compete with DIY solutions. Instead, you can become the go to authority for your ideal clients by helping them decide what they can do themselves, and what they should rely on a lawyer (like you) to do for them. And here’s how you can actually benefit from the online DIY services and even get referrals from them. First, become the authority for everyone in your market who needs estate planning help by offering regular educational talks on estate planning, and what people can do themselves, and what they need a lawyer to do for them. Then, leverage the search terms of people in your community searching for DIY solutions and run paid ads to your target market based on those search terms, promoting your educational presentation.

Your job is to become known as the authority, expert, educator and to focus your authority, expertise, and education on giving as much as you can freely to those who do not need or want intimate access and support from you.

By doing this, you’ll scoop up the clients who want the professional help of a trusted authority who is knowledgeable enough to offer education. Through the education of your community, you will make it clear that the next step for those who cannot or should not DIY is to move into more connection with you, leading into your intake and engagement system. When your engagement and enrollment process is easeful, it will show clients just how much stress you’ll take off their plate when they work with you.

Focus on Providing the Human Connection That AI Can’t Provide

People want an emotional connection with a personal lawyer who is going to help them with the most intimate family and financial matters during life and be there for their family when they can’t be. They want a lawyer who cares about them and their needs. If you want to keep, and grow, your book of business, you must provide your clients with the connection they want, expand your emotional IQ and offer a lifetime of relational support that can never be replaced by robots. Do this and you’ll never have to worry about AI replacing you.

Your humanity is the only non-replaceable technology you have, and you can invest in cultivating your next level relational skills. It’s very likely the best investment you can make in your law practice—use technology to get extremely efficient so you can have the time to create more connection with your clients.

Create a Revenue Model That Isn’t Dependent on Commissions, AUM or Legal Documents

Along with developing your relational skills, you need to get ready to shift your income model. If you’ve been operating as a “trust mill” style estate planning lawyer, selling wills and trusts or even insurance or investments, you’re going to be hardpressed to get clients who are willing to pay for any of that in the future, even if you’re only charging $1500 or $2000 per plan. Why would they do with you what they can do themselves online?

Many websites like FreeWill.com and LifeLegacy.io already provide free legal documents. So what will you provide that’s different? When you return to the heart and soul of “lawyer as trusted advisor,” and have a financial model for your law practice that pays you to guide your clients throughout life and guide their family beyond their lifetime, your clients will happily pay you $4k-$6k up front on average. Then, when you set your practice up with systems you can receive hundreds to thousands a year per client throughout their life to maintain their plan, and then their family will hire you to provide guidance after their death.

This is what we guide our Personal Family Lawyer (PFL) law firms to do. If you become a PFL, you’ll discover a better revenue model, better service deliverables, better engagement strategies, and very likely, a whole new way of being YOU. The great news is, once you decide to embrace this change, you’re going to love your life and law practice a whole lot more. It’s the true fulfillment of why you went to law school in the first place. And you’ll discover a way to be a lawyer that is truly fulfilling, financially, emotionally, and spiritually, and can never be replaced by robots.

Endnotes

1. Ali Katz (former name, Alexis Martin Neely) is the Founder/ CEO of New Law Business Model, and the author of two bestselling books, Wear Clean Underwear: A Fast, Fun, Friendly - and Essential - Guide to Legal Planning for Busy Parents, and The New Law Business Model Revealed: Build a Lucrative Law Practice That You (and Your Clients) Love

Learn more at www.NewLawBusinessModel.com .

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