6 Steps to Get Started with Estate Planning

Key takeaways

• Eight in ten people now expect their financial advisor to include estate planning in their offering, and 61% say deep tax expertise is very important in whoever handles that work, according to Vanilla’s 2025 State of Estate Planning report.
• Building an estate planning offering breaks down into six concrete steps: define the scope of service, build a team of professionals, train the team, set a fee structure, engage and educate clients, and choose the right technology.
• An interactive client questionnaire like Vanilla’s Estate Health Check, can surface a prospect’s net worth, existing documents, and potential state estate tax exposure before the first real planning conversation happens.
• More than 80% of people say they are comfortable with their advisor using AI to help build or explain an estate plan, particularly when it saves time and cost.
• Choosing estate planning software comes down to seven questions: how well it scales across client types, how accurate its projections are, how AI fits in and is secured, whether it creates documents, what support looks like, how it integrates with other systems, and how deep its security goes.

Why estate planning is a key differentiator (0:00–07:12)

Estate planning has stopped being optional. According to Vanilla’s 2025 State of Estate Planning report, eight in ten people now want their advisor to include estate planning in their offering, whether directly or through a partnership with another professional. Michael Schwoerer said that shift is changing what clients expect from a holistic relationship.

“Estate planning is becoming table stakes for advisors, and firms with a genuinely holistic offering tend to retain clients better and win new business more easily.”

The report also found that 61% of people consider deep tax expertise very important in whoever handles their estate plan, which raises the bar for advisors weighing how deep to go. Schwoerer framed the rest of the session around one practical question advisors ask next: they know estate planning matters, but where do they actually start?

Defining the scope of your estate planning service (07:12–10:02)

Larry Gincel, an estate planning attorney and solutions engineer at Vanilla, broke the estate planning process into three pillars: understanding a client’s current situation, planning for the future, and implementing and managing whatever changes follow.

“We want to understand what’s happening today in your client’s current situation,” he said, which means gathering existing documents and showing the client what would actually happen to their estate under the plan they have today, if any. From there, planning for the future means checking whether old documents, often drafted when children were young or wealth was lower, still match a client’s current goals, including any new or upcoming estate tax exposure. Implementing means deciding whether changes get handled through an attorney network or through in-platform document creation, depending on complexity. 

Advisors don’t need to take on all three pillars at once. The scope is a choice, not a default.

Building a team of professionals to collaborate with (10:02–12:03)

Laura Jogani, sales director at Vanilla, described a shift in how estate planning gets divided between advisors and attorneys. Historically, attorneys held onto estate planning almost entirely.

Now, “the advisor becomes the quarterback of the relationship,” she said, coordinating with outside professionals like attorneys and CPAs rather than stepping aside for them. Some of that work, like deep tax strategy or complex irrevocable trust drafting, will always sit outside an advisor’s scope, which makes a reliable referral network essential. 

Vanilla’s own attorney network, built through a partnership with the Trust & Will Center, gives advisors a fallback for clients in any of the 50 states: over 100 attorneys and paralegals with decades of experience. That kind of resource matters most for out-of-state clients or relatives an advisor’s own network may not reach.

Training and educating your team (12:03–14:32)

For most advisors, estate planning is new territory, which is why Gincel emphasized closing the educational gap between financial planning and estate planning before rolling anything out to clients. Vanilla pairs every advisor with a dedicated customer success manager, most of whom came from wealth management themselves, plus an in-house planning team of roughly a dozen estate attorneys who can review current documents when a case falls outside an advisor’s comfort zone.

Advisors also get client-facing materials for direct use in conversations, along with Vanilla Academy, where advisors can earn continuing education credit. The goal, Gincel said, is making advisors comfortable enough to explain complex material confidently, including why a client’s current plan might fall short.

Fee structure is important, transparency matters more (14:32–16:07)

Jogani was careful not to prescribe a specific fee model, but the data she shared pointed toward a preference for flat fees over variable ones. In practice, she has seen firms charge a separate flat estate advisory fee, fold estate planning into an existing planning fee, raise assets-under-management pricing to reflect the added value, or charge nothing at all and treat it purely as a retention tool.

Whatever the structure, she said the real takeaway is fee transparency. “People see value out of things that they pay for,” she said, so communicating a fee clearly, whether bundled into an existing charge or offered as something clients opt into, matters more than which specific model gets chosen.

Engaging and educating clients (16:07–22:58)

Once the earlier decisions are made, Vanilla gives advisors two starting points for gathering client information: an estate planning documents checklist and an interactive estate health check questionnaire. The health check goes out as a branded link a client fills out on their own, covering net worth, income, existing documents, and estate tax exposure by state. Answers flow directly into the advisor’s dashboard, where they surface prompts for the next conversation.

In one example shown during the session, a hypothetical client with a million dollars in net worth and no documents in place was flagged for a will or trust conversation, plus a prompt about state estate tax exposure and a built-in calculator for spotting a liquidity gap that life insurance could help close. 

Beyond the questionnaire, advisors get white-labeled, client-facing educational material covering topics from what happens without a plan through more advanced planning techniques, so one firm can support both a first-time conversation and a far more advanced one.

Finding the right estate planning technology for your firm (22:58–29:24)

Jogani closed the six steps with a framework that lines up with Vanilla’s own buyer’s guide to estate planning platforms, starting with a data point worth noting: more than 80% of people say they are comfortable with their advisor using AI as part of the process.

She laid out seven questions to ask any vendor. 

• Scalability: can the platform serve a full book of business, from legacy clients to the next generation, not just one client type? 
• Accuracy: how experienced is the legal and engineering team behind its tax engine? 
• AI fit and security: how is AI used to support the estate planning process and are the models trained on client data?
• Document creation: does the platform help draft documents, not just visualizations? 
• Support: what onboarding, training, and self-serve resources exist?
• Integrations: does client financial data flow in automatically?  
• Security: does the vendor maintain trust centers, SOC 2 reports, and penetration test results advisors can review on demand?

“Look for the platform that can provide for your full book of business,” Jogani said, “even if it’s something you’re aiming toward” as a firm grows.

Q&A highlights

How does a client know which estate planning documents they actually need through Vanilla?

Vanilla’s document builder includes built-in educational content and prompting that explains what each document package accomplishes and who typically uses it, so an advisor’s client can make an informed choice, Gincel and Jogani said. If a client starts down one path and later decides a different package fits better, they can revise their answers and update the plan rather than starting over.

How should an advisor add estate planning services without stepping into the unauthorized practice of law (UPL)?

Document creation happens directly between the client and Vanilla’s platform and attorney network, not the advisor, and that separation is intentional, Gincel said. “We’re trying to keep the advisors in a safe space when it comes to UPL,” he said, referring to the unauthorized practice of law. The educational material built into the document questionnaire, along with materials advisors can send ahead of time, is designed to help clients make their own informed decisions rather than having the advisor render legal advice directly.

About the speakers

Michael Schwoerer, former Head of Partnerships, Vanilla
Michael Schwoerer led strategic partnerships and integrations at Vanilla, bringing estate planning technology to advisory teams. He previously held sales, marketing, and business development roles at JPMorgan Chase and Addepar.

Laura Jogani, Director of Sales, Vanilla
Laura Jogani leads sales at Vanilla, helping RIAs and family offices bring estate planning efficiencies into their practice. Before joining Vanilla, she spent nearly five years as an advisor at JPMorgan Private Bank, working with ultra-high-net-worth families, endowments, and foundations on banking, trust, and investment strategy. 

Larry Gincel, JD, LLM, Solutions Engineer, Vanilla
Larry Gincel is an estate planning attorney and solutions engineer at Vanilla, bringing prior experience advising clients on wealth management and estate planning at an RIA family office. He holds an LLM in taxation from Temple University’s Beasley School of Law and works directly with advisors on structuring their estate planning offering.

The information provided here does not constitute legal, financial, or tax advice. It is provided for general informational purposes only. This information may not be updated or reflect changes in law. Please consult with an estate attorney, financial advisor, or tax professional who can advise as to your particular situation.