Elder Law Report
Elder Law Report
Tech-Forward Estate Planning Today
Paper binders and decade-old software don’t cut it for families making the most important legal decisions of their lives. We open the door to a tech-forward approach to estate planning—one that keeps the attorney’s judgment at the center while using smart systems to remove friction, reduce errors, and make every step easier to navigate. From secure, encrypted lifetime document storage to a streamlined intake process that captures assets and goals once and reuses that data across your plan, we show how thoughtful tools turn confusion into clarity.
We walk through the education-first foundation—videos, articles, and a resource-rich website—so you can understand wills, revocable trusts, Lady Bird deeds, beneficiary designations, and long-term care risks before you sign a single document. Then we unpack how our proprietary decision support pairs with legal expertise to evaluate options, surface requirements, and keep everything compliant and consistent. The result is faster, more accurate planning without sacrificing nuance: whether you’re choosing the right trust structure, coordinating titles and beneficiaries, or preparing for Medicaid lookback periods and care costs.
Security and client control stay front and center. With bank-level encryption, permissioned sharing, and fast access to PDFs, families can get critical documents to hospitals, advisors, or caregivers within minutes—without losing privacy. We also talk about why most legal industry software lags behind and how building our own systems helps us deliver timely, cost-effective service that actually fits how people live today. If you want an estate plan that is modern, secure, and deeply human, this conversation maps the path forward.
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How technology is changing estate planning. So there's an ever-changing landscape, I guess throughout time, but uh in the legal industry, especially in estate planning, with technology, uh, and that has an impact. Um I've always been of the mindset that we're going to be at McIntyre Elder Law or any firm that I'm associated with, um, a leader in technology. It always frustrated me when I came in the legal industry, and I felt like it was 100 years behind the times. And I really came out of a tech industry. And I've always uh I was a computer programmer early on, so that made sense to me. So what we've done at our firm is we not only stay up on recent changes in the law, but also try to make the process as efficient as possible for the client. We offer uh free online document storage and have for a long time for the rest of a client's life, um, where they can access their estate planning documents, uh, give access to, say, a child, trusted child, someone who they want to have it, uh, easily email facts, uh, shoot around documents, uh, PDF versions of those documents. Um, and that's behind a secure, encrypted bank-level security system. Um so that's one way that we've done that. Another way that we've really done that, and that I've always had this dream in my mind of doing, is taking my experience from a client calling in, a potential client. We call that a PNC, potential new client, a potential new client coming in. And also, how about I'll start with forming a trusted relationship, uh, making sure that we're giving out free education. We start there. We do videos. That is certainly leveraging current technology. We do uh written articles that we put online on our blog. Uh we have a website, mcelderlaw.com, that is a wealth of information. In addition, our practice, we don't want to move too fast because speed kills, but we also want to be efficient. So what I'm doing is I have a team of programmers that assist me in making sure we gather all the client information efficiently on the front end so we can use it. And then what we want to do in in our planning, so we know what all the assets are, what what the names are, all those things so we can do effective planning, so we can know whether the right plan is a trust versus a will versus a ladybird deed. Um we want to know the risk of long-term care. Um, and then if we were going to plan ahead to pay for long-term care, how are we going to do that? Well, what I'm developing, and we already have implemented in our practice over the last month and our testing is a system that really helps us take um estate planning to the next level by pairing the attorney with a system like that that allows them to make accurate and great choices, um, use their legal advice, their wit, their prowess, their experience in making the right choices for the client. And those things go hand in hand. So it's integrating the technology so that we're efficient, so that we can provide those services in a timely manner, in an efficient manner, and in a cost-effective way. So it's great for uh the firm. It's also great for the client. And that really, I'm at the tip of the iceberg of integrating current technology, which is amazing, by the way, um, with each one of our departments in a proprietary way that helps our clients. I am so excited about that project and what we're doing and how well it's working. Um I'll tell you, most of the other uh things for the legal industry, such as uh software or uh systems, are just so outdated. And it's it's it's just decades behind the times. So at McIntyre Elderlaw, we aim to be leaders, both in the legal industry and in the legal technology industry. And we are. So I'm Greg McIntyre, McIntyre Elderlaw. I'm an estate planning and elder law attorney at heart, and also um a lover of business and technology and providing great services for our client in a client centric approach. Client is number one, and we want all our people, systems, and processes to always remember and exude that. So