These days, it seems like all anyone is talking about is A.I. (artificial intelligence). From cooking recipes to exercise/workout planning to travel planning, A.I. seems to be transforming every industry. In the legal field, it’s no different, with lawyers and clients being inundated with advertisements about the way A.I. can improve the way they work.
The reality is that A.I. has not actually had much impact so far when it comes to legal services. Beyond helping law firms with marketing and virtual assistants, A.I. has proven itself to be pretty unreliable in the complicated and nuanced space that is the practice of law, particularly when it comes to drafting legal documents. There have already been a number of suspensions, disbarments and newsworthy stories of lawyers submitting court documents or contracts drafting with A.I., only to find the documents full of errors, mistakes or – even worse – the dreaded A.I. “hallucination” (A.I. just making things up or going off on a tangent no one asked it to!). No self-respecting lawyer (especially one who intends to keep their license!) would actually rely on A.I. to write a contract or provide legal advice to a client.
The same goes for wills. Given that everyone needs a will, this industry is likely to be quickly saturated with websites promising to provide an effective and comprehensive will, but really just selling a shoddy GPT-generated document. A.I. generated wills absolutely cannot be relied upon. Current A.I. relies on the aggregation of massive amounts of data (most of which is historical and at least a year or two old). The process of creating a will and the background knowledge required are just too specific, and the stakes are too high.
This is why our Will builder (check it out here) does not rely on A.I. Succession Wills was born from the extensive collaboration of a real lawyer and a software engineer to create a superior product. Every line of text, every branching tree of logic and every element of output in our system was carefully crafted by us.
So then what is this Succession Wills ‘AI Legal Assistant’ you keep hearing about? It’s A.I. done right! What we did was leverage the things A.I. is good at, and leave out the things it isn’t. Our AI Legal Assistant is a specially trained model that knows the ins and outs of our Will builder system. It’s an alternative to our traditional “wizard-based” tab-by-tab system which asks you to fill in question fields and select from dropdown menus as you input all the information and decisions our system needs to build your Will. To be sure, this is a great and easy-to-use interface – and it’s the only interface still offered by the competition like Trust & Will, LegalZoom, Ethos, FreeWill, WillMaker, Willful, LegalWills and Epilogue – but a lot of folks understandably want an alternative that more closely resembles what it’s like to do their Will with a lawyer.
How it works is you simply have a conversation with our AI Legal Assistant. It knows what questions to ask, and it asks them language you can understand. It also answers questions you may have along the way. The whole time, in the background, it’s taking your answers and “translating” or “mapping” it into our Will builder. Basically, you have a simple conversation, and it fills in the wizard questionnaire for you.
The critical innovation here is that this is the best of both worlds: the A.I. allows for a conversational, easy-to-use interface that mirrors what it’s like to do your Will with a lawyer, but the document generation process is tightly controlled and carefully crafted. All the benefits of A.I. without the hallucination!
