The estate planning practitioner’s guide to CoCounsel

Legal AI can help you stay on top of legislative changes, speed up redlines, and get valuable insights on complex issues

“Change is the only constant” is an apt description for attorneys with trusts and estates practices. State and federal laws and regulations, from probate laws to tax codes and beyond, are continually changed and updated. As a practitioner in this area, you need to stay on top of these shifts, and ensure the estate planning documents you prepare for clients comply with updated laws. 

Generative AI engineered for the practice of law, like CoCounsel, is well-suited for use by estate planning attorneys because it streamlines several critical and time-consuming tasks, such as reviewing complex new legislation, conducting legal research, and redlining estate planning documents. Here are just a few ways you can take advantage of CoCounsel in your estate planning practice.

Redline and update contracts in minutes

One of CoCounsel’s most useful skills for estate planning attorneys is Contract Policy Compliance. This skill is helpful when there’s been a change of the law, perhaps the tax code or state probate laws, and can help you more efficiently update estate planning documents to comply with new laws. 

For instance, in most jurisdictions, it’s left to the testator to decide whether a bond will be required from an executor or administrator. But let’s say your state’s law has changed and everyone is now required to post bond when serving as an executor or administrator.  

Simply upload contracts that must comply with the new law, such as wills, trusts, or other estate planning vehicles. Then enter the policy or policies—the new or different changes to the law—you’d like to check for compliance or noncompliance with (up to 100 documents and 30 policies, in Word, PDF, and text format).

CoCounsel will analyze your contracts for compliance, extract noncompliant clauses, and provide an answer detailing how the original clauses differ from the polices (changes to the law).

But the analysis doesn’t stop there—CoCounsel is smart enough to not only identify differences but to revise clauses, suggesting redline edits to bring all non-compliant clauses into compliance. It also provides a revised version of the clause with all redlines incorporated, so you can simply copy and paste the compliant language into your contracts, or download the entire revised document, saving you hours of painstaking, tedious review.

Identify key contract clauses with ease

The Extract Contract Data skill is ideal when you need a thorough, word-by-word review of a client’s estate planning documents to find specific information. It works with documents that contain clauses, such as contracts, wills, and trusts, and can even review every contract in a set and answer any questions about the contracts. 

For example, when a client passes away, the first thing an estate planning attorney often needs to do is contact the trustee or executor, and perhaps beneficiaries.

Instead of digging through lengthy wills and trusts to locate this information, you can upload as many as 100 documents to CoCounsel and then enter your questions, such as “Who is the executor?”

Running Extract Contract Datal will produce a chart with each question and a short answer. You can click the short answer to get a more detailed answer and analysis, the extracted contract language containing the answer, and a link to the relevant page of the contract.

Efficiently search databases

CoCounsel’s Search a Database helps you find the “needle in the haystack.” First, create your own database tailored to your needs. This could be a database for documents associated with one particular client, or a database of wills, trusts, or advance healthcare directives. 

Search a Database is invaluable when you’re dealing with a collection of documents, such as hundreds of contract templates, but don’t have time to read through each one. Or, perhaps you need to locate forms or the types of terms you’ve used in a will or trust in the past in order to draft a new document.

For example, let’s say you need to draft a pet trust. Select a database you’ve created, perhaps with various trusts you’ve drafted from templates, and ask CoCounsel what language you need to create a pet trust. 

CoCounsel will tell you specific language needed to establish a trust for a pet, with references to documents from your database and specific clauses within those documents. It will list relevant documents that contain these answers from the database you searched—perhaps a Revocable Living Trust Pet Clause and Model Will Clauses Providing for Care of Pet—with links to the documents.

Summarize dense legislation or lengthy contracts

The Summarize skill provides a condensed overview of critical information in plain language. Upload an array of information, such as complex legislation and lengthy contracts. 

As an estate planning practitioner, you know that new legislation is frequent. Perhaps there has been an update to probate laws in your jurisdiction. Upload the new legislation to CoCounsel to get a summary tailored to your needs, with options for a brief summary (a high-level overview in 1 to 3 paragraphs), detailed summary (multi-page summary including all important information), or comprehensive summary (page-by-page summary, recommended for statutes and contracts).

Once you have your summary, you can use follow-up skills such as Review Documents to ask questions about your document.

Simplify and streamline legal research

As an estate planning practitioner, you’re often confronted with unique facts or client needs.  CoCounsel’s Legal Research Memo quickly conducts thorough research on complex issues, helping you more accurately and efficiently advise clients.

Let’s say you’re a California-based attorney who needs to know whether a stepchild can be considered a child of the decedent for purposes of intestate succession. When entering your query into CoCounsel, use everyday language—as if you’re speaking to a colleague—and include all relevant information, such as jurisdiction and background facts. You can also use filters for your legal research, such as dates or unpublished opinions.

CoCounsel generates a short memo of the law on a particular legal issue with a short answer to your question, an analysis expanding on the answer with references to cases, and a list of relevant authority with links, such as cases, statutes, and regulations. CoCounsel also ranks the authority in order of relevance. The results can be downloaded or easily copied and pasted. 

Trusts and estates law requires practitioners to stay up to date with ever-changing laws and regulations. With the help of CoCounsel, you can streamline critical tasks such as reviewing new legislation, conducting legal research, and revising documents, so you not only save time, but can improve work product, tackle more in less time, and better advise your clients. 

To find more resources for using CoCounsel, visit our help center.

Featured posts

Draft Correspondence

Rapidly draft common legal letters and emails.

How this skill works

  • Specify the recipient, topic, and tone of the correspondence you want.

  • CoCounsel will produce a draft.

  • Chat back and forth with CoCounsel to edit the draft.

Review Documents

Get answers to your research questions, with explanations and supporting sources.

How this skill works

  • Enter a question or issue, along with relevant facts such as jurisdiction, area of law, etc.

  • CoCounsel will retrieve relevant legal resources and provide an answer with explanation and supporting sources.

  • Behind the scenes, Conduct Research generates multiple queries using keyword search, terms and connectors, boolean, and Parallel Search to identify the on-point case law, statutes, and regulations, reads and analyzes the search results, and outputs a summary of its findings (i.e. an answer to the question), along with the supporting sources and applicable excerpts.

Legal Research Memo

Get answers to your research questions, with explanations and supporting sources.

How this skill works

  • Enter a question or issue, along with relevant facts such as jurisdiction, area of law, etc.

  • CoCounsel will retrieve relevant legal resources and provide an answer with explanation and supporting sources.

  • Behind the scenes, Conduct Research generates multiple queries using keyword search, terms and connectors, boolean, and Parallel Search to identify the on-point case law, statutes, and regulations, reads and analyzes the search results, and outputs a summary of its findings (i.e. an answer to the question), along with the supporting sources and applicable excerpts.

Prepare for a Deposition

Get a thorough deposition outline in no time, just by describing the deponent and what’s at issue.

How this skill works

  • Describe the deponent and what’s at issue in the case, and CoCounsel identifies multiple highly relevant topics to address in the deposition and drafts questions for each topic.

  • Refine topics by including specific areas of interest and get a thorough deposition outline.

Extract Contract Data

Ask questions of contracts that are analyzed in a line-by-line review

How this skill works

  • Allows the user to upload a set of contracts and a set of questions

  • This skill will provide an answer to those questions for each contract, or, if the question is not relevant to the contract, provide that information as well

  • Upload up to 10 contracts at once

  • Ask up to 10 questions of each contract

  • Relevant results will hyperlink to identified passages in the corresponding contract

Contract Policy Compliance

Get a list of all parts of a set of contracts that don’t comply with a set of policies.

How this skill works

  • Upload a set of contracts and then describe a policy or set of policies that the contracts should comply with, e.g. "contracts must contain a right to injunctive relief, not merely the right to seek injunctive relief."

  • CoCounsel will review your contracts and identify any contractual clauses relevant to the policy or policies you specified.

  • If there is any conflict between a contractual clause and a policy you described, CoCounsel will recommend a revised clause that complies with the relevant policy. It will also identify the risks presented by a clause that does not conform to the policy you described.

Summarize

Get an overview of any document in straightforward, everyday language.

How this skill works

  • Upload a document–e.g. a legal memorandum, judicial opinion, or contract.

  • CoCounsel will summarize the document using everyday terminology.

Search a Database

Find all instances of relevant information in a database of documents.

How this skill works

  • Select a database and describe what you're looking for in detail, such as templates and precedents to use as a starting point for drafting documents, or specific clauses and provisions you'd like to include in new documents you're working on.

  • CoCounsel identifies and delivers every instance of what you're searching for, citing sources in the database for each instance.

  • Behind the scenes, CoCounsel generates multiple queries using keyword search, terms and connectors, boolean, and Parallel Search to identifiy the on-point passages from every document in the database, reads and analyzes the search results, and outputs a summary of its findings (i.e. an answer to the question), citing applicable excerpts in specific documents.

Skills

UNIVERSAL
Search a Database

Find all instances of relevant information in a database of documents.

Summarize

Get an overview of any document in straightforward, everyday language.

Draft Correspondence

Rapidly draft common legal letters and emails.

TRANSACTIONAL
Contract Policy Compliance

Get a list of all parts of a set of contracts that don’t comply with a set of policies.

Extract Contract Data

Ask questions of contracts that are analyzed in a line-by-line review

Prepare for a Deposition

Get a thorough deposition outline by describing the deponent and what’s at issue.

LITIGATION
Legal Research Memo

Get answers to your research questions, with explanations and supporting sources.

Review Documents

Get comprehensive answers to your questions about a set of documents.