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.

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.