EP Expert™ is a practice system "starter kit" for estate planners. It is for you if you want:

• A sophisticated Windows-based document drafting system to draft wills and trusts quickly and easily.
• Your own language in a custom system which is highly flexible.
• To minimize the "non-billable time" of attorneys to create, test and document the system.
• A system that prints the lawyer's outline checklist, with data filled in.

Click here to go to the EP Expert Download Page to download additional information.

Estate Planning Interface

EP Expert includes a highly-developed, flexible "front end" that lets a lawyer use the mouse to click through the options in an estate planner's outline of the facts and legal issues.

The wording and questions can be customized to meet the needs of your firm, but the system already includes most of the options allowed by state and federal law.

EP Expert lets you see "the forest" and "the trees." As you navigate through the outline on the right, the left side of the screen dynamically changes. Also, as you select options that make other questions irrelevant, the irrelevant questions are "grayed out." The lawyer can see all of the issues without needing to tediously answer questions one at a time.

Each attorney can save his or her favorite patterns in model data files. This eliminates the need to wade through all of the questions when the answers are usually the same. Simply load your favorite answer file, make the changes that apply to the current client, and click the "blast-off" button.

Better yet, when you print the checklist, "what you see is what you get." The printed checklist is a hardcopy of all the answers at the data entry screen. When reviewing a 30 page trust, the attorney can easily see what decisions have been made by looking at the checklist. The printed outline can be kept with the documents for review and as an audit trail.

"Mirror Image" Documents

EP Expert also automatically handles gender changes when you draft documents for a man, woman, or both, including pronouns (he/she, his/her), terminology (wife/husband, testator/testatrix), and information that is an exception to the "mirror image" rule, such as names of trustees and gifts of tangible property.

"Blast-Off" Screen to Merge Documents

We Understand Estate Planning

Jim Eidelman, designer of EP Expert, specialized in estate planning as an attorney before moving into consulting. He has developed many estate planning systems, and can turn EP Expert into a custom system for your firm.

There are options and variables for:

• Marital Deduction Formulas.
• Generation Skipping Options.
• A variety of different options for children's trusts.
• Irrevocable Insurance Trusts (First To Die, Second To Die).

Other staff members include attorney Chris Maeso, a recent University of Michigan Law graduate who has worked on customization of the estate planning forms for other firms, and Arita Sims and Jane Newmeyer, both of whom worked as paralegals or secretaries for estate planners in top Detroit firms.

Document Organization -- No redundant forms

The Word model documents are organized so that each one is a "shell" that has its own beginning and end, but they share a common model document in the middle that contains the substantive clauses. As changes in the law or drafting style require modifications, making a change in one place has a "ripple effect" through all wills and revocable and irrevocable trusts.

Integration with Document Management

WinDraft™ integrates with DOCS OPEN and other document management software in two ways:

• WinDraft data files are managed by DOCS OPEN, so that File Open and File Save use DOCS OPEN, just as with other applications.
• WinDraft includes an automatic PROFILE command. When you merge a number of documents at a time for the husband and wife, each document will be automatically saved in DOCS OPEN, and each profile will be completely filled out with information that is customized to the grantor/testator of that document, including a unique abstract that describes the provisions in the document.

Sophisticated Use of Word's Features

We make sophisticated use of all of the features of Word, which offers two key benefits:

• We have used "fields" within Word to change gender (he/she, wife/husband, etc.) and trust/will terminology in a way that hides the complexity from the user. This makes the model form documents much easier for attorneys to read and work with.
• We use Word's advanced features to do headings, formatting, paragraph numbering, cross-referencing, and table of contents. Whatever you set up in the model documents will end up looking right in the final documents.
• The final document is outputted right to Word. It can be edited, saved or printed just like any other Word document.

Consulting Services

Eidelman Associates stands ready to help the firm "jump start" the implementation of EP Expert. Depending on your needs and staffing, we will work with you to:

• Modify the question-and-answer checklist.
• Customize "legal help."
• Edit your Word documents so that they will merge well with our approach.
• Write custom documentation.
• Train both end-users and "techies" in how to set up, use, modify and support the system.
• Help integrate on your network and with DOCS OPEN.