For solo and small estate planning firms
A signed trust the family can’t follow. An inventory due, with the statements in a shoebox.
Intake questionnaires to chase, a summary letter after every signing, the old wills new clients bring in, and when someone dies, date-of-death balances pulled for the court. On a flat fee every extra hour comes out of your margin, and one misread plan or missed account is all an unhappy beneficiary needs.
The Small Firm AI Kit for Estate Planning: one Claude Skill with 17 ready-made playbooks.
- Client intake summaries
- Plain-English plan summaries
- Probate inventories
- One-time payment
- 30-day money-back guarantee
- Works on free Claude
Your plan in plain English, Client A and Client B (excerpt)
Who is in charge now: you are both trustees, and nothing changes in how you use your accounts or your home (Trust, Art. 2.1). If one of you can’t manage, the other carries on alone (Art. 2.3).
For money outside the trust: Child 1 can act for either of you under your powers of attorney (POA A, § 3; POA B, § 3). After you have both died, Child 1 takes over as trustee (Art. 2.4).
Checked before you see it
- Checked: Every sentence tied to an article or section
- Flagged: Beneficiary forms not in the file, marked [MISSING]
- Checked: Large-print version, legal terms explained once
Not an estate planning lawyer? There’s a kit for your area:
Compare all- Personal injuryMedical chronologies, specials and demand drafts, every row pinned to a source page.
- Family lawFinancial disclosure checks, chronologies and parenting plans, every figure sourced.
- ImmigrationRFE responses, evidence indexes and declarations that keep your client’s own words.
- Business lawContract reviews, formation files and operating agreement summaries, every clause cited.
- Real estateTitle commitment reviews, contract deadlines and lease abstracts, every line sourced.
- Elder lawLook-back transfer logs, Medicaid checklists and POA reviews, every entry sourced.
If this sounds like your week, keep reading
- A box of statements on the conference table, the inventory form on screen, and one date-of-death balance you still can’t find.
- The intake questionnaire comes back half empty, and the first meeting goes on asking how the house is titled and who the 401(k) names.
- The eldest daughter emails for the third time this month to ask when the distribution happens, and the update gets written at 9 p.m.
- Your client, 82, signed a 40-page trust last month and calls to ask who is in charge if she gets sick.
Where the hours go
Roughly 12 hours a week go to the same five jobs
The same week with Claude and these playbooks: about 6 hours back
- Today
- With The Small Firm AI Kit for Estate Planning
Intake questionnaires and follow-up
Today: 3 h/wkWith The Small Firm AI Kit for Estate Planning: 1.5 h/wkPlain-English summaries of the plan
Today: 2 h/wkWith The Small Firm AI Kit for Estate Planning: 1 h/wkReviewing the old wills and trusts clients bring in (Pro)
Today: 2 h/wkWith The Small Firm AI Kit for Estate Planning: 1 h/wkBuilding probate inventories from the statements
Today: 2 h/wkWith The Small Firm AI Kit for Estate Planning: 1 h/wkClient and beneficiary updates, and time entries
Today: 3 h/wkWith The Small Firm AI Kit for Estate Planning: 1.5 h/wk
Today: ≈12 h a week, ≈576 h a year on this work.
Back in your week with Pro, our estimate
≈6 h
With Basic: ≈5 h
Example starting value: $250. Move it to your own number.
- Pro pays for itself after
- ≈24 min
- Time back, each month
- ≈$6,000
How we estimated these numbers
Only part of a small-firm lawyer’s week ever gets billed, and on a flat fee the extra hours never are. A big share of the rest goes to work that repeats on every file. This is a conservative picture for a practice that is mostly planning: a new planning client and a signing most weeks, a client bringing in old documents to review most weeks, and about one estate administration a month. If you handle more probate, the inventory hours grow.
- Intake questionnaires and follow-up, 3 h/week: Our estimate: about 3 hours per new planning client to read the questionnaire, chase what is missing and write the summary, one client a week. No published figure found.
- Plain-English summaries of the plan, 2 h/week: Our estimate: about 2 hours per summary letter explaining a signed plan to the client and family, one signing a week. No published figure found.
- Reviewing the old wills and trusts clients bring in, 2 h/week: Our estimate: about 2 hours to read an old will, trust and beneficiary forms and list what needs updating, one client a week. No published figure found.
- Building probate inventories from the statements, 2 h/week: Our estimate: about 8 hours to build one estate inventory from a box of statements, titles and letters, one administration a month. No published figure found.
- Client and beneficiary updates, and time entries, 3 h/week: Our estimate: about 36 minutes a working day on status emails to clients and beneficiaries and on time-entry narratives. No published figure found.
These are our estimates, not measured results. No published study times these estate planning tasks, so we started from the conservative hours above and assumed every task still needs you: checking each value against its statement, deciding what is probate and what isn’t, judging capacity and intent, clearing every [VERIFY] and signing off. So we cut each task by half at most. For comparison, in the 8am 2026 Legal Industry Report 38% of legal professionals who use AI say it saves them 1–5 hours a week, and nearly one in four say six or more.
Week: A standard 40-hour week (our basis). Clio’s 2025 Legal Trends for Solo & Small Firms puts utilization at 27% for solos and 32% for small firms: at those rates only about 11–13 of the 40 hours get billed.. Yearly figures use 48 working weeks, monthly ones 4.
One Skill · 17 playbooks inside
Describe the file. Get the actual draft.
One Skill in Claude: you say what you need in plain words, its router opens the right playbook, and back comes a draft with every value sourced. These are excerpts of what comes back, built on fictional, anonymized facts. The will and trust themselves stay in your drafting software.
Twenty pages of answers turned into one page, with what is missing listed first.
You ask
“Client A and Client B sent back the questionnaire. Summarize family, assets and wishes on one page before Thursday’s design meeting.”
You get
Family, assets, fiduciaries and wishes on one page, with the issues for you flagged.
Playbook: estate-planning-intake.md · in every plan
estate-planning-lawyers/
├─ SKILL.md
the router: reads your request, opens the right playbook
├─ your profile, saved at setup
└─ playbooks/
├─ citation-guard.md
├─ confidentiality-preflight.md
├─ engagement-letter-ai-clause.md
└─ … 14 more
See all 17 playbooks
In every planBasic · $49
- Every citation flagged before anyone else sees it
citation-guard.md - Client data anonymized before any work starts
confidentiality-preflight.md - Updates clients and beneficiaries actually read
client-update-writer.md - Time entries clients don’t push back on
billing-narrative-cleaner.md - A probate inventory with every asset sourced
estate-inventory-builder.md - A one-page intake summary from the client’s questionnaire
estate-planning-intake.md - A plain-English summary of the plan the family can read
plain-english-plan-summary.md
Added in ProPro · $99
- An engagement letter with an AI clause, ready in minutes
engagement-letter-ai-clause.md - An update checklist from the old documents clients bring in
existing-document-review.md - Beneficiary designations checked against the plan
beneficiary-designation-audit.md - Creditor notices and claims tracked in one table
creditor-claims-tracker.md - An administration calendar with no invented deadlines
administration-deadline-calendar.md - An estate or trust accounting that ties to the statements
fiduciary-accounting-draft.md - Letters to beneficiaries and heirs, drafted from the file
beneficiary-letters.md - A trust funding checklist, asset by asset
trust-funding-checklist.md - A first-steps guide for the successor trustee
successor-trustee-guide.md - A distribution schedule computed from the plan
distribution-schedule.md
Why not just ChatGPT?
Why not just paste the statements into ChatGPT?
Around 70% of solo and small-firm legal professionals already use AI (8am 2026 Legal Industry Report; Clio 2026), but only 9% of those 8am surveyed say their firm has an AI policy and actually enforces it. A plain chatbot is fast, but it doesn’t know your state’s probate procedure, your court’s forms or where its figures came from. Trusts and estates now has its own AI failures on the record.
Generic AI
- Ibach v. Stewart (Alabama Supreme Court, April 2026): in a family dispute over a trustee’s fiduciary duties, the appellants’ briefs cited cases and quotations that don’t exist. The court dismissed the appeal, ordered the lawyer to pay the other side $17,200 in fees and costs (counting a check he had already sent) plus double the appeal costs, barred him from filing in that court unless another lawyer co-signs, and referred him to the State Bar.
- Matter of Weber (Saratoga County Surrogate’s Court, New York, October 2024): in a dispute over a trustee’s handling of a trust property, an expert used Microsoft Copilot to cross-check his damages figures but couldn’t say what prompts he used. The court ran its own Copilot query on three computers, got three different answers, found his calculations unreliable and held that counsel has an affirmative duty to disclose the use of AI.
- Estate of Acciavatti (Arizona Court of Appeals, July 2026): a self-represented son challenging his sister’s appointment as personal representative filed a brief in which six of eight citations were deficient and two cases didn’t exist. He was ordered to pay the fees they caused, in what was reported as Arizona’s first published opinion on AI in court filings. Not a lawyer’s mistake, but the same failure.
- A chatbot doesn’t know whether your state uses a probate referee, an affidavit in lieu of inventory or receipts and releases, and it won’t tell you when it is guessing a deadline. In this kit, deadlines come only from the rules you enter, marked [VERIFY].
The Small Firm AI Kit for Estate Planning
Why this works where a plain chatbot didn’t
- 1
Anonymized before anything starts
Confidentiality Pre-Flight runs first on every task: it offers anonymized mode, swaps names for Decedent A and Beneficiary 1, masks account numbers, and reminds you to use a business plan that doesn’t train on your data.
- 2
Every value sourced, every total computed with code
Estate Inventory Builder ties each asset to its statement and page and totals it with code, inputs shown. Plain-English Plan Summary ties every sentence to the article it explains, and anything without a source is marked [NO SOURCE].
- 3
No invented deadlines or cases, and your signature last
Deadlines come only from the rules you enter in your Firm Profile, each marked [VERIFY]. Citation Guard never generates an authority. Every output ends with a verification block, the human checks it needs and a line for your sign-off.
How it works
Set up once. Then just ask.
No coding, no prompts to copy. You install it the way you would add a document to Claude.
- 1
Download the ZIP
Right after checkout you get one ZIP, ready to download on the page: a single Claude Skill for your practice with every playbook in your plan inside. No account, no login, no subscription.
- 2
Upload it to Claude
Add it once in Claude’s settings. After that you just ask for the work: the Skill reads your request and opens the right playbook, so you never pick a file yourself. It runs on every Claude plan, including Free with code execution turned on. For real client files, use a business plan that doesn’t train on your data.
- 3
Answer the 5-minute Firm Profile interview
State, county, court, the probate procedures you use most, house style, signature, and the deadlines your state sets, entered once from your own rules and never guessed. Saved once and read by every playbook, so no draft starts in the wrong state.
Compare your options
What the other options cost
These are the real alternatives a solo or small estate planning firm has today, at the prices reported for them. None of them is wrong, and the kit doesn’t replace your drafting software. They are priced for a different job, or a different firm.
- Estate planning drafting software (e.g. WealthCounsel’s Wealth Docx)Price on request: WealthCounsel says membership is priced by number of users and productsBuilt to draft wills and trusts, and good at it, so keep it. Trust administration is a separate product (Wealth Tracx), and plain-English summaries and old-document reviews are still your hours.
- Legal AI subscription (CoCounsel Legal)Roughly $490–850 per attorney a month, depending on firm size and term (no published price; third-party reports, 2026)Built for legal research and billed every month per user. It doesn’t build a probate inventory from a box of statements.
- Your own hours, or a paralegal’sYour hourly rate, every statement and every summary letterDone again on every estate, and on a flat fee those hours aren’t billed.
- A generic chatbotAbout $20 a monthNo forms, no document references, no verification, and it will produce a creditor deadline that sounds right. Account numbers pasted into a consumer account can breach confidentiality.
- Claude’s official legal pluginsFree to install, paid Claude plans onlyNo estate planning or probate plugin, and nothing that drafts an engagement letter AI clause.
- The Small Firm AI Kit for Estate Planning$49 or $99, once$49 or $99, paid once. Even Pro costs less than one month of a CoCounsel Legal seat as third parties report it, and it never renews.
Pick your plan
One payment. Yours to keep.
Less than one month of a legal AI research subscription, with no renewal after it. One payment, yours to keep.
Pro costs, once
$99
Basic: $49 once
It pays for itself after
≈24 min
of time won back, at $250 for an attorney hour
Get back just 1 hour a month
$250
a month, against a one-time $99. Our estimate is ≈6 h a week.
Break-even = plan price ÷ the hourly value set in “Where the hours go” above.
Basic
The core kit plus the three estate planning essentials.
$49one-time
7 ready-made playbooks
Try it on real work. Not for you? Full refund within 30 days.
- 4 core playbooks: Citation Guard, Confidentiality Pre-Flight, Client Update Writer, Billing Narrative Cleaner
- Estate Inventory Builder, every asset tied to its statement and page
- Estate Planning Intake Summary with a list of what is missing
- Plain-English Plan Summary for your clients and their families
- Firm Profile interview: set your state, procedures and house style once
- Verification block at the end of every output
Pro
The full estates workflow, from intake to the final distribution.
$99one-time
All 17 playbooks
Only $50 more than Basic: +10 playbooks and the Pro bonuses below.
Try it on real work. Not for you? Full refund within 30 days.
- Everything in Basic
- Existing Document Review for the old wills and trusts clients bring in
- Beneficiary Designation Audit
- Creditor Claims Tracker
- Administration Deadline Calendar, no invented deadlines
- Fiduciary Accounting Draft that ties to the statements
- Beneficiary Letters
- Trust Funding Checklist
- Successor Trustee Guide
- Distribution Schedule computed from the plan
- Engagement Letter + AI Clause, with a joint-client paragraph
- Word templates for your inventory, accounting and plan summary letter
- Firm Style Guide: your house style, applied by every playbook
- Sample outputs from every playbook, to compare against your own
- 12 months of fixes and adjustments to the included playbooks
30-day money-back guarantee
Run the kit on a real, anonymized file. If it doesn’t earn its place in your practice within 30 days, email us and we refund every cent. No conditions.
- One-time payment, no subscription
- Works on free Claude
Practice in a different area? Personal injuryFamily lawImmigrationBusiness lawReal estateElder lawTell us yours →
No Claude account yet?
No Claude yet? You’re 2 minutes away
Claude is Anthropic’s AI assistant. Its free plan runs The Small Firm AI Kit for Estate Planning: you create the account, switch on one setting and upload the kit, in about two minutes and without a credit card.
- The free plan works: no subscription and no credit card to start
- About two minutes from sign-up to your first request
- Paid plans only add more usage, for when you want it
Client confidentiality comes first. Every task starts with Confidentiality Pre-Flight, which offers anonymized mode and swaps names for placeholders like Decedent A and Beneficiary 1. Try the kit free on anonymized facts, then run real files on a Claude business plan, which doesn’t train on your data.
- 1
Create a free account
Go to claude.ai and sign up with your email, Google or Apple account. It’s free and ready right away.
- 2
Turn on one setting
In Settings → Capabilities, switch on “Code execution and file creation”. Skills need it, and it’s free.
- 3
Upload your package
In Customize → Skills, click “+”, choose “Upload a skill” and select the ZIP you received. Then just ask.
Fair questions
What estate planning lawyers ask before buying
Is it ethical to use AI on client matters?
ABA Formal Opinion 512 doesn’t forbid it. It asks you to understand the tool, verify its output, protect confidentiality (informed consent may be needed), communicate with the client, supervise staff and charge reasonable fees. Estate work adds two duties the kit keeps in view: Model Rule 1.14 on clients with diminished capacity, which it flags but never judges, and explaining to spouses planning together how information is shared between joint clients. The kit gives you an AI clause for your engagement letter, anonymize-first by default and a human-verification block on every document. It is aligned with the guidance; it doesn’t certify compliance.
Is my clients’ financial data safe?
Every task starts with Confidentiality Pre-Flight, which offers anonymized mode, swaps names for placeholders like Decedent A and Bank 1 and masks account numbers. Use Claude’s Free plan only to try the kit with anonymized or fictional data; for real client files, use a business plan that doesn’t train on your data.
Will it invent cases or deadlines?
Citation Guard never generates an authority: it extracts every citation, marks it [VERIFY] and tells you whether it appears in your uploads. Deadlines come only from the rules you enter in your Firm Profile, each marked [VERIFY], and a date with no rule behind it stays blank. We don’t promise zero errors. We promise every citation and deadline is flagged for you to check.
I already have drafting software. Why would I need this?
Keep it. The kit doesn’t draft the core will or trust. It works on everything around the documents: the intake before them, the plain-English explanation after the signing, the review of old documents clients bring in, and the probate or trust administration after a death.
Doesn’t Anthropic already do this?
Claude’s official legal plugins, announced in May 2026, focus on commercial, corporate, employment, privacy, IP and litigation work. None is built for estate planning or probate, and none drafts an engagement letter AI clause. These playbooks fill that gap and run on Claude’s Free plan, while the plugins need a paid plan. We are independent and not affiliated with Anthropic.
Built for your rules
Built for your state’s probate procedure
Pick your state in the Firm Profile and the playbooks switch forms, vocabulary and the steps they remind you of. Deadlines always come from the rule you enter and stay marked [VERIFY].
Your setup
Uniform Probate Code states
Arizona, Colorado, Michigan and the other states that enacted the UPC in whole or in part, each with its own changes.
- UPC vocabulary throughout: personal representative, informal and formal proceedings, successors
- Inventory and notices follow the structure you set for your state’s version of the code
- Your state’s deadlines entered once from its code, every date on the calendar marked [VERIFY]
- Nothing assumed from the model code where your state changed it
Guardrails
Verification isn’t a disclaimer. It’s the product.
Every output ends with the same verification block: key statements, the source of each, the items marked [VERIFY], the human checks this document requires and a line for your signature. We never promise zero errors. We promise every citation and every deadline is flagged for you to check.
Sample verification block
From: Your plan in plain English, Client A and Client B (excerpt)
- Checked: Every sentence tied to an article or section
- Flagged: Beneficiary forms not in the file, marked [MISSING]
- Checked: Large-print version, legal terms explained once
- Verify: Anything the documents don’t say is left as a question for you, never guessed
- 01
Citation Guard
No authority is ever generated. Every citation is marked [VERIFY] and checked against your uploads: found in your documents, or NOT FOUND, verify before filing.
- 02
A source on every value
Every asset, claim and balance carries its document and page. Anything without one is marked [NO SOURCE], and every sentence of a plan summary points to the article it explains.
- 03
Numbers computed with code
Inventory totals, accountings and distribution shares run as code with the inputs shown. No asset is valued and no tax is computed unless you supply the figures.
- 04
No invented deadlines
Creditor windows, inventory and accounting dates come only from the rules you enter in your Firm Profile, each marked [VERIFY]. With no rule entered, the date stays blank.
- 05
Anonymize first
Before any task, anonymized mode is offered: names become Decedent A and Beneficiary 1, account numbers are masked. Consumer plans are for trying the kit, not for client files.
- 06
Capacity and influence: flagged, never judged
If notes show confusion, a new helper steering the plan or a sudden change of beneficiary, the playbooks flag it for you. Under your state’s version of Model Rule 1.14, judging capacity and any protective action stay with the lawyer.
- 07
Joint clients, explained up front
For spouses planning together, the engagement letter draft includes a paragraph on how information is shared between joint clients, for you to adapt. NYC Bar Formal Opinion 2017-7 advises explaining this before the representation begins.
- 08
No unreviewed advice to clients or beneficiaries
Client updates, beneficiary letters and plan summaries carry an “Attorney review required before sending” banner. Nothing goes out as legal advice without you.
FAQ
Everything else
Didn’t find your answer? Email us:hello@summonskills.com
What exactly is in the ZIP?
One Claude Skill for your practice. Inside: a router file (SKILL.md) that reads each request and opens the right playbook, one Markdown playbook per job (7 in Basic, 17 in Pro), each with its instructions, templates and verification block, and the Firm Profile interview every playbook reads. Pro also includes the Firm Style Guide inside the Skill, plus a bonus pack: Word templates for the estate inventory, the beneficiary update letter and the plan summary and sample outputs from every playbook. 12 months of fixes and adjustments to the included playbooks are included (new playbooks for future rule changes are not part of that).
Does it work on Claude’s Free plan?
Yes. The Skill runs on every Claude plan, including Free, as long as code execution is turned on. Free is fine for trying the kit with anonymized or fictional facts. For real client files, use a business plan that doesn’t train on your data.
I use ChatGPT. Will this work there?
No. The kit is built as a Claude Skill, and ChatGPT has no equivalent way to install it once and have it open the right playbook for each request. Claude’s free plan is enough to try it, an account takes a minute, and you can keep ChatGPT for everything else.
Which states does it cover?
Any US state. Your Firm Profile records your state, court and the deadlines your rules set, and every playbook uses them. It comes with notes for Uniform Probate Code states, California, Texas, Florida and New York. Forms and deadlines always come from the rules you enter, marked [VERIFY].
Will it draft the will or the trust?
No, by design. Your drafting software and your judgment do that. The kit starts where they stop: it organizes the intake, explains the signed plan in plain English, reviews old documents and runs the administration paperwork after a death.
Does it help with elder law clients?
With the paperwork side, yes. The intake summary flags what matters for an older client (who holds the power of attorney, the health care directive, long-term care plans, a family member doing the talking), the plan summary can be printed in large type for the client and the agents, and the document review reads old powers of attorney and directives alongside the will and trust. It does not decide capacity, compute Medicaid eligibility or design a spend-down, and it never states a look-back period or state limit from memory: those stay your judgment, flagged [ATTORNEY] or [VERIFY].
Does it connect to my practice management or drafting software?
No connector needed. Export the questionnaire, statements or documents as PDFs or Word files from whatever system you use and upload them to Claude.
What if it isn’t right for my practice?
Email us within 30 days and we refund the full price. No conditions.
Is this legal advice?
No. The kit is for licensed lawyers and their staff. It drafts and organizes; you review, decide and sign. You remain responsible for every filing and every letter that leaves your office.
Your next intake, plan letter and inventory, every line sourced before it leaves the office.
Questionnaires, signed plans and statements in; every fact tied to its page or article, totals computed with code, deadlines only from your own rules, and your sign-off last. About 6 hours a week back, by our estimate. $49 or $99, paid once. Use it on a real, anonymized file, and if it doesn’t earn its place within 30 days, we refund every cent. Not legal advice; for licensed lawyers.
One payment, yours to keep · 30-day money-back guarantee