Karen Nachbar

Jun 26, 2025

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Understanding the Risks of UPL

As Chief Legal Officer at Vanilla, I speak with customers frequently about the risk that the unauthorized practice of law (UPL) presents for wealth advisors. Balancing UPL risks as we build product is top of mind for our incredible team at Vanilla. We include thoughtful guardrails but also provide flexibility to our customers who can decide for themselves how to best mitigate their risk.

What is UPL, and why should you care?

UPL is giving legal advice when you’re not a lawyer. Every state has its own definition of UPL, but generally speaking, it includes:

• Drafting or preparing legal documents
• Advising someone on their legal rights or responsibilities or making legal decisions for someone
• Interpreting legal documents
• Making legal recommendations a specific legal solution (e.g., “You should use an advanced trust”). Try to avoid the word “should.”

As an advisor, you know that estate strategy understanding is a differentiator, and you want to do everything in your power to help your clients, but you want to be careful to not overstep. Educating yourself and putting the right guardrails in place is essential. 

So what can you do?

We believe that advisors can educate, empower, and support—without giving legal advice. 

1. Educate and empower

It’s helpful to clients when you explain estate planning concepts like wills, trusts, and powers of attorney and give them reliable resources to consult. Use analogies, diagrams, and educational resources (like those built into tools such as Vanilla Document Builder) to help clients truly understand their estate plan. One key element in helping to avoid UPL is enabling the user to make their own decisions. Because of this, you may want to avoid steering them toward which solution they should choose. 

The best estate planning tools are built to guide users—not advisors—through decision-making, so that they are making their own choices. Vanilla Document Builder, for example, puts the advisor’s client in the driver’s seat by providing robust educational content so they can make informed choices based on their own needs. Within Vanilla Document Builder there is help content available for each question, plus videos and longer knowledge base articles. Because of the robustness of the support provided, we receive incredibly positive feedback from our customers about the high rate of document completion with our product.   

Advisors are not expected to make the legal calls—just help clients understand when a tool is right for them, and think about when it’s time to call in a lawyer.

2. Use the Vanilla Attorney Network

Some estate plans cannot be handled by software. Certain clients have complex legal needs and need an attorney to guide them and draft bespoke documents. It’s essential in those cases that you are collaborating with your clients’ attorneys and that you’re working with people you can trust.

The Vanilla Attorney Network, which can support clients of all wealth levels in all 50 states, makes it easy to connect clients to legal professionals who are excited about collaborating with and including the advisor in meetings —without putting you in the hot seat. The Will & Trust Center has 100+ trust and estate professionals who engage with advisors routinely and understand how to provide comprehensive team support to their clients.

3. Be clear about boundaries

It may help to add a short disclaimer to your client-facing reports or proposals, noting that you’re not providing legal advice. Even better: align with your legal and compliance team on what this should say.

4. Choose software purpose-built for helping to mitigate UPL risk 

Some of our competitors’ software tools easily permit advisors to make decisions and craft documents on behalf of clients, which makes me wonder whether those providers have considered UPL at all. Vanilla’s approach is vastly different: we avoid making overt recommendations to the user, enable the user to understand thorny legal concepts, and require that the client navigate the questionnaire themselves. Of course, the advisor can offer as much support as they are comfortable providing, but the client must make their own determinations within the software, which helps to protect the advisor from UPL.

Vanilla has also developed robust advisor resources on UPL to help you understand the issues and empower you to mitigate risk as you see fit:

• Article: Deep dive  into UPL – Find details on the UPL guardrails embedded in Vanilla, and tips for how advisors can mitigate their risk: 
• On-demand webinar: Unauthorized Practice of Law Training – I recently had a fireside chat with our own outside UPL counsel, Pete Kennedy of Graves Dougherty Hearon & Moody. 
• Advisor training on demand: And Vanilla will soon roll out an advisor training module on UPL in Vanilla Academy. Customer legal and compliance teams can require that their advisors take the training. 

The information provided here does not constitute legal advice and is provided for general informational purposes only. This information may not be updated or reflect changes in law. Please consult with your internal legal and compliance teams to understand how they want to approach risk around this topic.