For solo and small estate planning firms.
Findings you would not have found, in files you already closed.
TrustGuard checks the estate plans your firm drafted against a fixed list of conditions, once a year, and brings what it finds to you. Your clients stay your clients.
Who pays
Your firm pays TrustGuard a flat rate per household. Your clients pay us nothing. We are never paid anything connected to legal work — no share of an amendment, no referral fee, no percentage of anything you bill.
What the software does, and where you come in
- Your client answers a structured set of questions once a year, and their documents are read against a fixed list of conditions.
- You review the findings and decide what, if anything, the plan needs.
The questions firms ask first
- Note 1
What stops it flagging fifteen things on a healthy plan?
Findings are sorted into four lanes before anyone sees them, and only one lane reaches an attorney. The rest are administrative, informational, or things the client can settle themselves. A plan that has drifted typically produces 3 to 8 findings — not dozens.
Findings that rest on something we established from the documents are kept separate from open questions where a client told us they were not sure. They are different kinds of work and they are never pooled into one number.
- Note 2
Can I check a finding without re-reading the whole trust?
Every finding carries the language it rests on and where that language sits. If two provisions disagree, you get both passages, not a summary of them.
A finding you cannot verify has to be trusted or re-derived from scratch, and both cost more than not having it. Anything we cannot show the basis for is not sent.
- Note 3
Who chases the clients who don't respond?
Your firm still owns contact with your clients. That does not change, and we would not want it to.
What comes off your desk is the analysis, the schedule, and the file. Reminders go out on a fixed cadence — two, three weeks apart — and then stop and hand the household back to a person. A client who has stopped responding is a state your firm can see, not a gap someone has to notice.
- Note 4
If something is flagged and we don't act on it, has that created a record against us?
You review every finding, and what you decide is recorded with it — what was decided, on what basis, and by whom. A documented decision not to act is a stronger position than no record at all.
Your engagement terms state what the annual check covers, and the list is fixed and published. Some firms will look at this and decide it is not for them. That is a reasonable conclusion and we would rather you reach it now than at renewal.
What it checks for
Every plan is checked against the same fixed list of conditions — 78 enumerated checks, published in full. The list does not vary by client, and what a review covered is stated on the report itself.
For the person who actually runs it
Work is grouped by household, not by finding — one client, one file, everything about them together. Staff can settle the administrative items without an attorney. Files where someone has died are marked, and nothing asks anyone to chase them.