Cutting to the Chase: AI-assisted Document Review

We asked thought leaders across the wealth, legal, and tax advisor communities how technology could improve estate planning workflow. Not surprisingly, AI was mentioned frequently with equal amounts of hope and skepticism. Over the next few months we’ll expand on what we heard and elaborate on what we believe is possible. Today, in our first installment, we cover the review of legal documents.

Starting at the Beginning

Whether the task is discussing an existing plan with a client or prospect, or exploring new trust & estate strategies with someone whose circumstances have changed, the starting point is always the same: a painstaking review of legal documents. Here, like many of the challenges in the estate planning process, the work involves time consuming & manual activities such as reading through extensive text and notetaking. To complicate matters, unlike tax forms, trust & estate documents are often non-standard, and each drafting attorney often phrases terms and organizes documents in their unique manner.

Imagine a workflow using AI as your compass. First, it would navigate you to key trust terms and conditional information, spread across dozens to hundreds of pages. AI improves upon keyword search, as it can read data across multiple pages, identify various terminology, and extract many data points at once. Additionally, documents in various formats, including scans of decades-old documents, can be interpreted.

Next, a generative AI layer could be applied to automatically translate the original document into a short, easy-to-read summary that organizes and highlights important trust details, including key people, trust terms, and beneficiary access stipulations. These summaries can be generated within seconds, and used as a starting point for deeper analysis or quick reference in the future.

Separating Fact from Fiction

Reservations about what AI can and cannot do are not misplaced. Users of AI-generated output should recognize limitations in capturing nuanced provisions, for example, while having a higher degree of confidence in names, dates, and other basic information that form the foundation of a legal document.

Taken together, the overall benefits of AI-assisted document review are clear: Reducing an hours-long manual process to a fraction of the time, and enabling experts to focus their attention on spending time with clients, and providing thoughtful holistic advice. While at the same time creating a digital summary that is easily accessed across investment, legal, and tax advisor collaborators.

Luminary AI for Advisors

Starting today, Luminary customers can request access to our beta feature to generate AI summaries of any uploaded document.

▶︎ Request a demo for access to the Luminary AI Beta

The next evolution of this feature is to automatically extract trust data from documents and store it in Luminary. These advancements are prime examples of how advancements in technology and a workflow leveraging AI can drive substantial improvements in an advisor’s efficiency, allowing experts to focus effort on where their value-added is the greatest, and provide more time for meaningful interactions across more clients.

What's next?

In our next post, we will discuss how AI can help advisors onboard clients to Luminary, model and communicate complex estate plans, and systematically identify new opportunities.

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