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Wills and Trusts: Are there forms available?

  • 16 August 2023
  • 4 replies
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T

I joined a new firm and we will be integrating Smokeball into our Real Estate and Estate Planning practice. I started a “dummy” file to look at the Wills and Trusts forms but don’t see any.  Does Smokeball not have any Wills and Forms available?? Will we need to use the forms from some other resource (IICLE) and upload them for processing?

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Best answer by JKibler 19 August 2023, 15:10

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Sara Sultan
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Hello Ted,

The only Estate Planning forms that come with Smokeball are ones that are public forms, like state Powers of Attorney documents.  There are no generic trust and will templates.  You can supply us with your will or trust template that you use and we can add in the automation to turn into a template.  It will proprietary for your firm (no other firms will have access.)

Sara Sultan (she/her)
J
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@Ted Lane i recognize from your reference to IICLE that you are in Illinois as am I. Welcome to SB or at least SB forms. 
 

@Sara Sultan SB’s ability to allow users to do template creation and automation with user data is great. I find that it works best if I make my own forms and ask for help in learning to use the system, rather than asking for my forms to be automated by smoke ball. I have also found that wills and trusts are some of the most complicated forms to automate because the inputs and outputs are so multivariate depending upon each situation. This is the practice area that I have been the least successful in automating. 
 

I appreciate that many attorneys want to keep their forms confidential. Do you also have users that want to collaborate and share forms? I think bringing forms in and out of the forms SB repository to share with other users is not technically feasible. It would be neat if IL estate attorneys - and other groups - could have a shared repository with levels of permissions (admin/editor/user-viewer) etc and if we could pool our efforts to make great form sets together.

There could also be another approach with paid authors where someone creates form sets for a practice area and there is a cost per form use with a split between the author/maintainer and Smokeball.

In summary, I believe SB needs to facilitate template collaboration between users for certain practice areas such as this one in order to make better use of template automation. 

Sara Sultan
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As usual, I love your ideas, Jonathan!  @Hannah @maryellen.kellehere @Ian Sperry I think I have heard something like this mentioned at some point over the years.

Sara Sultan (she/her)
J
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I have also found that wills and trusts are some of the most complicated forms to automate because the inputs and outputs are so multivariate depending upon each situation. This is the practice area that I have been the least successful in automating. 

 

Just adding my two cents:   we bailed on the notion of automating estate planning documents given the difficulty in getting consistent direction from clients from day 1 to signing day.  

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