FreeWill, a social-good enterprise at the nexus of philanthropy and estate planning, announced today the launch of Estately, a software solution that allows financial advisors to offer full-service estate planning as a component of their comprehensive wealth management practices, enabling them to guide each step of the process centrally.
Estately leverages the client-facing technology and scale of FreeWill to serve the full spectrum of financial advisors. It purports to be the first product that combines digital self-drafted and attorney-drafted documents on a unified platform.
Mercer Advisors collaborated on the design for 18 months as an anchor customer and is completing a full roll-out; 60+ firms have since been added during the beta period.
“As we’ve scaled FreeWill from an idea to the most popular online estate planning platform in the country, we continue to constantly receive inbounds from financial advisors who love our platform and want to use it with their clients,” FreeWill co-CEO Jenny Xia Spradling said. “We began to recognize that existing solutions for estate planning don’t offer a drafting experience that covers all clients. We took the big leap to develop attorney drafting software in order to provide a scalable, consistent experience between attorneys and clients. We married that with our top-rated self-directed drafting technology to create the first truly integrated estate planning drafting platform.”
Spradling believes that estate planning has, for too long, been a painstakingly patchwork process for financial advisors and clients. Integrating these experiences is the key to ensuring consistent client involvement in the plan.
Mercer Advisors President Daniel Gourvitch agrees.
“Mercer was founded 40 years ago by an estate planning and tax attorney, so what’s most important to us is that the work gets done. We want to maximize client follow through on the estate plan,” he said.
When asked why he chose to work with Estately specifically, particularly since they already offer in-house estate planning options, Gourvitch explained that the company was looking for a way to make their people more productive, specifically in their ability to flex up and down client wealth levels (Mercer’s existing estate planning offerings were tilted towards high net-worth clients). Estately’s technology offered Mercer the ability to scale, and FreeWill’s successful track record reassured Mercer that, as Gourvitch puts it, “We weren’t experimenting on our clients.”
The process of using Estately is fairly simple. Advisors direct their clients to the platform either via their own branded website or by sending a personalized invitation link. Once on the platform, the client can choose whether they’d prefer a self-directed or attorney-led process.
The self-directed approach is very similar to FreeWill’s already existing product. The client decides which documents they’d like, such as wills, revocable living trusts, financial powers of attorney or advanced healthcare directives (there is also a quiz that can help clients figure out what documents they’re looking for). Then, they complete a guided questionnaire to populate those documents, which are then generated with all signature pages, schedules and other addendums, ready for execution.
For clients who are looking for more help from an attorney, Estately partners with a firm that offers a network of estate-planning attorneys across all 50 states and the District of Columbia who can provide a full breadth of options, from simply walking clients through a fairly simple plan to designing and executing something much more complex for someone of higher net worth. Clients sign engagement letters with these attorneys, creating a traditional attorney/client relationship, including all the duties that implies.
Regardless of the option chosen, the work is still entered into the Estately system, which features document drafting software for affiliated attorneys to use. The advisor is kept involved and in the loop via their personal dashboard, where they can track the progress of the plan, download document packages for clients and view a simple visual plan summary, which can also be used as a client deliverable.
Accidentally falling afoul of rules against the illegal practice of a law is a concern for many advisors that keeps them from adding estate planning to their practices. According to Spradling, Estately attempts to assuage this concern by setting up what she calls “guardrails” on the platform.
“Effectively, the platform makes it very easy for advisors to help out with activities that they’re legally allowed to help with, but near impossible to engage in aspects they shouldn’t.” she said. For example, Estately has many CRM integrations, as you’d expect from such a platform, and advisors can easily interact with the information therein. However, all decision-making processes are at the sole discretion of the client.
As far as price, Estatelty charges firms a fixed annual subscription fee based on the total number of advisors. This subscription offers unlimited access to all of Estately’s tools and the full network of attorneys. However, if the client decides to go the attorney-led route, that will create a separate relationship, so the attorney’s fees aren’t included in the flat rate (though there’s nothing stopping the advisor from working out any number of specific payment agreements with that attorney to deflect or defray client costs).
