The legal fine print behind estate planning tech: What RIAs need to know

The wealth management industry has spent the better part of five years stacking estate planning software into its tech ecosystem. The tools are slicker. The client-facing experiences are smoother. The compliance headaches, however, may not have gone away – they may just have moved around.

That, in broad strokes, is what Alex Hargrove, chief executive of NetLaw, has been telling RIA firms. The Louisville, Kentucky-based company operates as a tech-enabled law firm that delivers attorney-led estate planning through wealth management partners, frequently alongside document-generation platforms rather than in place of them.

A national survey of 5,000 US adults published this month by Trust & Will, one of many names in the increasingly crowded estate planning tech platform space, found that 56% of Americans have no estate planning documents of any kind – no will, no trust, no medical directive, no power of attorney – and 42% say they would not know what to do if a family member died today.

On AI, the survey found that 30% now say they trust AI more than a human attorney for estate planning guidance, a 10-percentage-point jump from 2025, yet just 5% would use AI to generate estate planning documents without any attorney review.

While Hargrove acknowledged the need for the advisory industry to move quickly toward digital estate planning tools during the COVID era and beyond – the T3 advisor technology survey found category penetration for estate planning software went up from 15.84% in 2023 to 52.60% this year – at least some firms might not have been able to fully account for the legal distinctions separating a software product from a licensed law practice.

"The position advisors are often put in is awkward when it comes to self-service tools," he told InvestmentNews in a recent interview. "They have to tell a client: go through this process – and by the way, I can't help you with it. There's always this pressure to be helpful, but also this countervailing pressure that you can't, because unauthorized practice of law is a real issue. It's a third-degree felony in the state of Florida."

He is not dismissive of why digital tools gained traction. After all, legacy law firms do not scale – net promoter scores for law firms tend to land in the 20s – and for advisors managing clients across many states, the traditional referral model amounts to a list of attorney names with little to no consistency or accountability behind it. But on the flip side, he said client's legal and financial needs tend to outpace those tools.

"As clients get more sophisticated, their needs get more complex. It's not always about assets. A blended family – someone in a second marriage, a stepchild from a prior relationship – those situations are more complicated to plan around," Hargrove said.

For many advisors, the $3 to $5 million asset range serves as a rough threshold for bringing in legal help. But Hargrove sees things more on a case-to-case basis, with the potential for meaningful complexity to set in considerably earlier in households' wealth journey.

Read more: Why advisors should lean into estate planning - not portfolios

NetLaw's model relies on a multi-attorney structure: a lead attorney handles the engagement from intake to execution, while an attorney licensed in the client's home state joins for at least one planning meeting. Hargrove says it requires roughly 100 attorneys to operate at scale, with annual re-verification built in – attorneys who do not clear the compliance queue cannot be matched with clients.

A recent statement from the company claims it now supports RIA and wealth management firms overseeing more than $400 billion in client assets, following new partnerships with Carson Group and Merit Financial Advisors, alongside pre-existing relationships with mega-RIAs Mariner Wealth Advisors and Wealth Enhancement Group. It says paid engagements grew fourfold during 2025, and the company reached profitability, having operated without institutional funding for most of the year.

Last year's growth, Hargrove said, largely came about through positive experiences with the platform within large firms. "I got an email from one of our advisors – I won't name the firm – who said 'I just want to tell you how impressed I've been with the whole process,'" he recalled. "I was hesitant. [But] this was such an easy, pleasant experience."

Like other platforms, NetLaw has incorporated AI into its operations, though Hargrove doesn't see it as overly central to its value proposition.

"AI benefits us from a margin enhancement perspective. We've integrated with Anthropic's model and use it at numerous points in our workflow to reduce the amount of time an attorney has to spend on any given matter," Hargrove said. "But it's not what's driving growth. That's what allows us to scale and streamline on the back end."

For advisors still working out how to structure estate planning delivery, Hargrove's pitch tends to start by challenging one basic assumption. "I think advisors often believe they need to know more about estate planning than they actually do," he said. "Advisors don't need to know everything about estate planning to start engaging their clients in a meaningful way around it."

The argument extends across the asset spectrum: millionaire-next-door clients face the same structural risks – blended families, a potential divorce, questions about inheritance timing – as those with far more.

"If you ask a client with $1 to $2 million in assets whether they'd like to spend a little money to make sure a son or daughter-in-law doesn't someday walk away with half of their child's inheritance – most of them are going to say yes," Hargrove said.