If I need to answer a question, one of the first places I look for that answer is the internet.  Before the internet, if you wanted an answer to a question, you had to drive to your local library and hope you could find a book on the subject.  Nowadays, you merely need to type your question into the computer and the answer, or more likely multiple answers, appears.

Of course, you have to wonder how accurate the answers you find are.  In life, you often get what you pay for, and when you don’t pay much, well, you often can’t expect much.

With the pervasive nature of the internet has come a number of companies selling various services to the masses, and legal services are no exception.  I have had clients come to see me who have said, “We thought about using the internet to draft our Wills, but we wanted it done right.”  For every person who tells me this, I’m sure there are more people who decided the cheap price on the internet was worth saving the few hundred dollars more that a lawyer would charge.

Obviously, I’m biased.  I would like everyone to come to see me to have their estate planning documents drafted.  And, yes, I do draft estate planning documents for the old and young alike, despite my being an “elder law attorney.”

The fact of the matter is, I actually do believe that the estate planning documents I draft are better than the estate planning documents you find on the internet.  I attended law school for three years and graduated with honors.  My entire career has been dedicated to elder law.  I have won more merit-based awards than any other lawyer I know.  I have worked six days a week for years in this one area of the law.

So, do I think I can draft estate planning documents for you better than you can using a computer program … well, yes, I do.  And I think I have some substantive basis for my thoughts.  To use an analogy, a person could perform surgery on himself, but I wouldn’t advise it.

The thing with estate planning documents is, when someone goes to use those documents, you won’t be around to make corrections or to fill in the gaps.  For instance, if you make a mistake in your last will and testament, you simply won’t be around to correct your mistake.  If you leave something out of your power of attorney document, when someone goes to use the power of attorney, you probably won’t have sufficient mental capacity to make changes to your power of attorney document.

Omissions and mistakes can be very costly to correct.  While omissions and mistakes can be corrected in many instances, those corrections often involve petitioning a court in one way or another asking the court to correct your mistake.  By the time you get to court, you will almost certainly have hired a lawyer and the cost of the procedure will far outstrip the cost of having your estate planning documents professionally drafted in the first instance.

Moreover, when you have your estate planning documents professionally drafted, you have a third-party, the attorney, who can attest to your intentions.  So, even if something does need to be correct, the attorney is there to assist with the correction.  When you draft your documents on a website, that company probably won’t exist when the problem with your documents is discovered ten or more years from now, and that internet company certainly won’t have any background information surrounding your documents.  All that company knows is what you plugged into their computer program in response to their generic, pre-programmed questions.

In life, I find that you get what you pay for.  If you are paying next to nothing for something, you probably aren’t getting much more than that.

Decisions based only on cost can create issues that are difficult to correct later. Looking at long-term impact can help avoid unnecessary complications.