True North Advisors Elevated Estate Planning Across Their Client Base

The Challenge

The team had a clear goal: ensure all clients have a foundational understanding of their estate plan and confidence it aligns with their wishes. The challenge was to create the capacity and consistency needed to deliver this level of insight to all clients while maintaining the high standards expected by the firm.

Estate planning is deeply personal and can be challenging to standardize at scale. Reviewing documents, building flowcharts, and manually tracking fiduciary roles consumed significant planner and advisor time, reducing the face time with clients. “The amount of time our team spent reading documents line by line or working in Excel and PowerPoint creating personalized estate flowcharts was significant,” Jamie said. “We didn’t have the capacity to assist all advisors and clients.”

The result: in-depth estate reviews completed by the planning team were only done for a small percentage of clients. 

The Solution

True North evaluated Vanilla head-to-head against competitors before selecting the platform. Three factors drove the decision:

Compliance architecture. Vanilla’s AI doesn’t learn from client documents — a critical requirement for a firm operating under SEC oversight. 

Modeling depth. Vanilla’s estate scenario capabilities, exemption utilization, portability, and flowcharts tied directly to document data were more advanced than the alternatives at the time.

Pricing structure. Other platforms charged in ways that didn’t work for a firm with a mix of senior planners, advisors, and associates. Vanilla’s model fits into how True North actually operates.

The Results

Document reviews and summaries that took hours now take minutes. 

Running estate documents through Vanilla and receiving a structured summary of fiduciary roles and key provisions gave Jamie’s team its time back and changed the quality of client conversations. “Being able to generate a summary in a few minutes then walk into a client meeting prepared to discuss exactly who sits in key roles, what those roles mean, and whether that reflects the client’s actual intent, creates a more impactful conversation,” Jamie said.

New document types, new conversations. 

Vanilla’s ability to analyze a broader range of documents, including entity documents and marital agreements, expanded the depth of conversations Jamie’s team could have with clients. The team can now enter meetings prepared to discuss key provisions, potential conflicts, and distribution structures outlined in key documents clients bring for our review. 

Associates ramp faster. 

Training new planners and associate advisors to read estate documents used to take years of accumulated experience. Now our associates can run documents through Vanilla from day one and focus their learning on high-value interpretation rather than mechanical extraction. “A new associate could now review 50 documents in their first week,” Jamie said. “We’re training them on the key elements that matter, instead of just having them go through documents and manually create outputs for the first few years.”

Standardization across the firm. 

Integrating Vanilla firm-wide has allowed us to provide personalization for our client base with the consistency of deliverables across advisory teams. 

Disclosure: True North Advisors is a client of Vanilla. This testimonial was provided by a representative of True North Advisors. No compensation was provided for this testimonial.