Is Online Estate Planning Actually a Good Idea?

The honest answer: for some documents, yes. For others, no. A simple will or a basic advance directive is often reasonable to generate with a well-built online tool, as long as your state doesn't require anything unusual. A trust, a blended-family estate, or anything involving business ownership is not. That's attorney territory. Treating it as a form-filling exercise is how families end up back in court.

The more useful question for most people isn't "will vs. online tool." It's what happens between having documents and your family actually being able to use them. An attorney drafts your will. Nothing about that process organizes your bank accounts, insurance policies, or the location of your safe deposit box key. That's a separate, ongoing task, and it has nothing to do with legal complexity.

On AI specifically: a language model can explain what a durable power of attorney is. It can draft a rough first pass at instructions for whoever handles your affairs. But it can't notarize a document, know your state's witnessing requirements, or take responsibility if it gets something wrong. For anything legally binding, that gap matters.

Where a guided tool earns its place is the organizational layer underneath the legal one. It keeps the pointers, who your attorney is, where the will is kept, which accounts exist, current and in one place. That holds true whether the documents themselves came from a lawyer or a template.