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Many people request information about where to
find a reliable, legal online will drafted according to their individual
state laws. Of course, the best recommendation for any person will be
personally selecting and consulting with a properly licensed attorney.
Although everyone's individual circumstances are
different, some of the more important reasons for having a last will can
often be satisfied without much complication. For instance, online
wills can be used to name a child's guardians.
Rather than recommend a service, it is more
useful to provide some of the factors that should be evaluated.
Although there may be additional factors for any given person, the following
are some of the factors that can be used to evaluate any online will
service.
The overall quality of any document creation
site is reflected by the investment devoted to making the site truly useful.
Are they just trying to sell you a will or have they created a site that
allows you to purposefully create a will that serves your needs?
As shown by the continued growth of online tax
preparation and filing services, many professional tasks can be completed
independently online, provided that the site gives you the proper guidance.
A key factor that establishes your ability to
effectively use any service is the type of information that is made
available. Instructional information should be available in at least
two levels with any online service or software: 1) Brief and easily
understood instructional information, and 2) detailed and descriptive
educational information.
Providing brief instructional resources allows
you to complete your will in less time, while educational resources allow
you to more competently complete your will. When you understand the
overall operation of your document and how the different steps relate to one
another, you have greater confidence that its terms are correct.
Basically, when you are evaluating any service,
you must ask yourself how well they have demonstrated their knowledge and
understanding of your state's laws.
Better services allow you to preview the basic
steps that are involved with making your will, without requiring you to sign
up or provide your email address first.
While you may not be able to review portions
that require database interaction in order to function properly, you should
at least be able to view the screens at each step and have an idea of the
basic program flow.
By opening up its screens for easy review, the
online will service allows you to have an idea of whether it will fit your
needs before you begin completing the required steps.
Just as with any other product or service you
are considering, you should be able to get a general idea of what the
service has to offer before you are required to commit yourself to it in any
way.
Everyone is familiar with the "mega-convenience
stores" that allow you to buy groceries, office supplies, and motor oil all
in one building. These stores are purposefully designed to serve only
your most basic needs, without catering to those times when your needs are
more specialized and important.
Similarly, online services can spread their
resources across multiple types of unrelated legal documents or can be
designed for greater focus and attention to detail.
Your last will and testament is one of the most
important documents that you will own. Your will not only dictates the
ownership of your property, it can also be used to control who will raise
your children, who will manage your children's property, and create trusts
designed to reduce the federal estate tax.
When reviewing any service, consider whether
they offer a large selection of various documents designed to serve only the
most basic needs or whether they are focused and devote their resources to
documents relating to estate matters.
When using any online will creation service, you
are working without a law firm or attorney. For this reason, it is
important for every service to provide features that are designed to
minimize the occurrence of errors to the fullest extent possible, while also
facilitating your expected ease of use.
All online services are designed to allow you to
independently complete your own documents. In order to competently
meet this goal, every service should also be designed to ensure that your
completed documents are legal.
Any uncertainty in the terms of your will can
lead to unnecessary inconvenience and delay, as well as creating the
potential for otherwise unnecessary legal expenses.
Despite this, some services require their
customers to describe specific legal events, such as when a trust will
terminate. Although this may seem like a desirable feature, consider
how few of us have experience drafting legal language.
Suppose you place trust instructions into your
will with a service that requires you to describe when the trust ends.
If you want your child to pursue an education beyond high school, you may
type "when he graduates from college" or something similar as the factor
that determines when the trust ends.
This may seem like a valid instruction, but what
happens if your child attends a trade school to study culinary arts,
carpentry, or network administration? Your child achieved a secondary
education and may have a very successful career, just as you had wanted.
However, your child never "graduated from college" as specifically required
to end the trust.
Although this may not seem like an important
distinction, many factors can affect how strictly trust terms will be
enforced, such as the size of the trust, those who will benefit from the
trust if it is not released, and even the fees that are being collected by
the trustee who manages it.
Keeping in mind that only a lawyer is legally
permitted to review your document and offer any advice about your choice of
terms, these types of errors will not be discovered until the trust is
already in force.
The best way to ensure that the documents are
not ambiguous is to offer choices that do not allow for variation.
Using trusts as an example, limiting the choices for ending a trust to an
age removes all ambiguity. A person is either a specific age or is
not, without any discrepancy.
Before computers, stationary stores would
occasionally sell fill-in-the-blank forms for very simple matters, such as a
bill of sale or basic lease.
A few services still sell these sheets of paper
with preprinted text and blank spaces to hand-print the required
information. You try to determine which category most closely matches
your situation ("Married with minor children", "Single", etc.) and then
receive something that requires you to write in various points of
information.
There are many concerns with fill-in-the-blank
services, which concerns are so obvious they do not warrant any discussion.
Because of the very basic nature of these products, no time was spent
reviewing the actual sheets of paper provided by any of these services.
Although all online services are self-help, you
must use particular caution when using any fill-in-the-blank form. |
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Just as services that are priced at the low end
of scale should be approached with caution, services that are priced at the
higher end of the scale should be carefully reviewed. The costs of
these documents are typically inflated to recover unnecessary company
expenses.
Does the site display multiple celebrity photos
and endorsements? We all know that actors, talk show hosts, and
television figures don't typically contact companies to offer them a review
and complimentary photo.
Celebrity endorsements must be purchased and are
most often very expensive, particularly with high-profile celebrities.
While there certainly isn't anything wrong with
engaging in an advertising campaign, the costs of advertising must always be
recovered. The costs of buying celebrity endorsements can only be
recovered by passing those costs on to the customer in the form of higher
document prices. Greater advertising costs simply means greater
product costs.
More importantly, celebrity endorsements do not
increase the legal document's reliability or quality. Celebrity
endorsements only increase the cost of providing you with the document and,
therefore, increase the document's price.
Just as with celebrity endorsements, review
services are additional costs that a company must recover by charging higher
consumer prices.
When a company offers to review your will,
carefully examine the terms of the review service to find out exactly what
is performed before relying on it. (In some cases, you will have to
search the site for a while to find an actual description of the review
service.)
In most instances, the review is simply a
collection of unnecessary services that are designed to make you believe
someone has examined the contents of your will to determine if it is legally
valid.
To the contrary, these review services usually
do nothing more than 1) spell check the words you enter, 2)
set the margins, and 3) spell out abbreviations. In fact, one
service even offers to make sure the same font is used, despite the fact
that the customer never chooses any fonts.
Consider that you are normally typing in the
names of family members and friends when you complete an online will.
With so many different variations with the spelling of people's names, it is
simply impossible for any service to accurately spell check those aspects of
your will. All other aspects are prepared by the company and shouldn't
need to have the spelling rechecked. The same is true of place names,
in that no one is familiar with every city and town in the United States and
can't possibly know when they are all spelled correctly.
Even though these reviews aren't useful, any
company that provides them must still pay people to sit somewhere and spell
check every document and, of course, any cost to the company is a higher
cost to the consumer.
Live support is occasionally offered to make
consumers believe that they can call for personal advice about completing
their wills. Unfortunately, these services create a false sense of
security.
No matter what the circumstances, only a
properly licensed lawyer is allowed to give any type of personal legal
advice. Any other person is engaging in the unauthorized practice of
law.
It doesn't matter if someone is a paralegal,
legal document assistant, or even a law school graduate, they cannot give
legal advice. The law forbids these people from telling you what
information you should enter and even forbids them from giving you any
advice about you which form you should use.
This type of live support can often be placed
into the same category as the review services that are really just spell
checking - padding designed to make customers believe they are getting a
higher level of service than they are really receiving.
Basically, a legal document site that provides
live support from people who are not permitted to give any type of legal
advice is the same as any legal document site that does not provide live
support, with one exception: the costs of paying people to be
available by telephone. These higher document prices are applied to every
sale, even though you may never use the telephone.
Knowing that review services and live support
cannot assist you with ensuring that a document meets your individual
wishes, you must always review the final document that you receive.
Even documents that are drafted by an attorney should be reviewed for
accuracy in the spelling of names and places.
The most common errors occur during the entry of
personal information, such as when you misspell a person's name or
accidentally enter the wrong city. Fortunately, these kinds of errors
just involve retyping, are very simple to correct, and can be completed in
just a few minutes.
You are the only person who can correct these
errors, because you are the only person who knows what you intended to type.
Considering this fact, the length of time that it takes to have the
corrected document in your possession and ready to sign must be strongly
considered. If it takes just seconds to make a correction, it
shouldn't take days to sign your will.
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