Dennis Kennedy

From the excellent DealNews.com, which gives you a daily email option and a choice of RSS feeds to bring you all kinds of Internet bargains:

**WillWriter 2002 for $1.99** - 10:16 am

software-blowouts.com offers Broderbund's WillWriter 2002 for $1.99, the lowest price we've seen. Shipping is $5.95.

http://dealnews.com/newsdaily.html?article,65888

I'm having a hard time (and I used to do only estate planning) coming up with an argument as to why not to use this for my own will, for a set of standard forms, or, in cases where there are no estate tax concerns or other special circumstances, to recommend this software to a reasonably savvy person to prepare a draft and then hire a lawyer only to review the documents and supervise their proper execution. In the last option, a client would pay only a small fraction of the going rate for estate plans while still getting the services that are the most important for a lawyer to provide. A case could be made that an estate planning lawyer should scoop up a bunch of these at $1.99 and offer them free to new clients, outsource the preparation of documents to clients, and charge them only for review and execution services and a "maintenance" plan.

The real practice of law question that I am trying to come to terms with these days: Should the cost of standard "form" document preparation drop to zero and document preparation simply be a standard feature of a "legal services package"?