Software for estate planning attorneys
The whole practice, down one branch.
The lifecycle is the product, not a feature. Intake, matters, documents, signatures, billing, and client portal, all carrying your firm’s name.
Built by Matt Schmeisser, inside a working estate planning practice.
Chen, Margaret & David
Couples estate plan
- Lead form submittedMar 4
- Consult heldMar 12
- Engagement letter signedMar 19
- Intake processedApr 2
- Documents in draftingnow
The stack most firms run
Pieced together by hand, and none of it works together the way you want.
With Per Stirpes
One record for clients carried from inquiry to delivery.
Why a vertical tool
The seam between your tools is where the work goes.
A CRM for the top of the funnel. A practice manager that starts at engagement. A drafting tool. An e-sign tool. A payments tool. Each is capable on its own, and the firm pays for the gaps between them in rekeyed data, chased signatures, and context lost in email.
Per Stirpes is the vertically integrated platform built for the estate-planning attorney, so it runs that whole flow on one record. Intake lines up with every draft. There are fewer accounts to manage, fewer logins to chase, and fewer places to lose track of where a matter stands.
The lifecycle
From first contact to closed engagement.
Horizontal practice tools serve a hundred practice areas, so they hand you blank pipelines and make staff maintain them. Per Stirpes serves one, and ships its lifecycle whole: ten stages, two sides, and a definition of done for each.
Tap any stage to see the signal that moves it.
The funnel
Win the engagement
Flips when
The prospect submits your intake form and the matter moves to Schedule. Nobody drags a card.
Flips when
The prospect books a consult slot on your calendar. The booking itself moves the matter to Consult.
Flips when
You mark the consult held (or skip straight to engagement). Whether a meeting was productive stays your judgment, so this one is yours to record.
Flips when
The engagement letter goes out for signature and the matter moves to Convert. Drafting alone doesn’t advance it; sending does.
Flips when
The client signs. The signed engagement letter is the boundary: the matter crosses to the pipeline and lands in Discovery.
The signed engagement letter
where the funnel becomes the pipeline
The pipeline
Deliver the work
Flips when
The client completes the detailed intake, or you mark it processed. Either moves the matter into Drafting.
Flips when
You share the drafts with the client. The share is the signal; the matter moves to Reviewing.
Flips when
The signing invite goes out and the ceremony gets booked. Substantive edits cycle the matter back to Drafting instead, honestly.
Flips when
You confirm the ceremony was held. A canceled booking retreats the matter to Reviewing; a held one advances it to Closing.
Flips when
The disengagement letter goes out and the matter marks itself complete. The record stays, closed and intact.
Stage that maintains itself
Stages aren’t a dropdown anyone keeps honest. They derive from facts the platform already records: a form submitted, a booking confirmed, a letter signed. When the facts change, the board is already right.
Software for one practice area can know things a hundred-area platform never will.
What a testator is. Which state’s formalities apply. That a married couple is one engagement, not two files. Per Stirpes is built down, not across.
What you’re buying isn’t a feature list. It’s the operating knowledge of a working estate planning practice, encoded into software no firm could specify for itself.
One record
Answered once, available everywhere it’s needed.
Intake answers become canonical client data, not text rekeyed into each document. Every template reads from the same record, so a single change propagates to every document that depends on it.
One field on the record
Successor trustee
Sarah M. Chen-Park
Updates every document that names them
Pour-over will
Sarah M. Chen-Park
Revocable trust
Sarah M. Chen-Park
Financial POA
Sarah M. Chen-Park
Healthcare directive
Sarah M. Chen-Park
Change a fact once and every document that names it follows. No rekeying into each one, no two drafts that quietly disagree.
Drafting
Your templates, filled from the record and checked before they go out.
Upload the firm’s own Word templates and map their fields once; every draft then resolves from the client record instead of being rekeyed. Open any document and see its complete merge model beside the page it produces: every field, the value resolved for this matter, what it draws from, and what still needs attention. Nothing about the document is a mystery before it goes out.
Your documents, your counsel.
Per Stirpes doesn’t ship will and trust content, on purpose. Your templates encode your judgment and your state’s formalities; a platform that replaces them replaces the lawyer. We run everything around them. And if your documents come from a drafting library, that composes too: the output is still a .docx template you own.
4 ready · 1 needs attention
{{healthcare_agent}}Needs a value{{settlor.full_name}}Margaret L. Chen{{trust.name}}Margaret L. Chen Revocable Living Trust{{successor_trustee[0]}}Sarah M. Chen-Park{{settlor.county}}Travis CountyPreview
Revocable Living Trust
of Margaret L. Chen
This Declaration of Trust, made by and between Margaret L. Chen, residing in Travis County (the “Settlor”), establishes the Margaret L. Chen Revocable Living Trust.
During the Settlor’s lifetime, the Trustee manages the trust estate for the Settlor’s benefit, and the Settlor may amend or revoke it at any time.
Upon the Settlor’s death, the successor trustee shall be Sarah M. Chen-Park.
- Firm-owned .docx templates, mapped once in a guided workbench
- Engagement letter e-signed; estate documents execute in person
- Delivered and executed documents mirror to the firm’s own Google Drive
What’s inside
One system built for estate planning, not adapted to it.
Intake
Intake that fits a real engagement.
Build the questionnaire once in the editor, then clients move through it section by section, on any device, with no account to create. And because a couple is one engagement, not two files, both spouses answer the same intake; the firm compares their answers side by side and reconciles them into one record, with neither one overwriting the other.
- A sectioned questionnaire that saves as the client goes, no account to create
- Couples are one engagement: both spouses answer one intake, reconciled without either overwriting the other
- Conditional sections and prefilled return visits, built from your own questions
- Every submitted change reviewed against the record before it lands
Healthcare agent
Both agreeMargaret
David A. Chen
David
David A. Chen
Successor trustee
Differs · reviewMargaret
Sarah M. Chen-Park
David
Daniel R. Chen
Client experience
Your clients always know where their plan stands.
Clients see their engagement in plain language: what’s done, what’s happening now, and the one thing to do next. No status spreadsheet, no “where are we?” calls. Estate planning is a referral business, and a client who felt guided from first call to signing ceremony tells people. Behind that view, every milestone lands on the matter the moment it happens, so the firm’s history is true without anyone keeping a tracker.
- A client view that shows progress and the single next step, in plain language
- A milestone history on every matter, written as real events happen
- Stage-driven email keeps clients moving without anyone chasing them
Getting started
Engagement signed, your matter opened.
- 2
Your information · in progress
Next step
Finish your questionnaire so we can keep drafting your plan.
Continue - 3
Drafting
Your attorney prepares your plan.
- 4
Review & sign
You review the drafts, then sign and notarize.
- 5
Complete
Your plan is executed and funded.
Packages & billing
Built around how estate planning firms actually charge.
Modern estate planning firms sell flat-fee plans, and a real share of engagements arrives through legal insurance. Horizontal tools make you fake both, with activity codes and custom fields. Per Stirpes makes them structural: a package carries its intake, documents, and price as one versioned offering, and a legal insurance plan is a payer your invoice actually routes to.
- Flat-fee packages: the intake, the documents, and the price, published together and attached to a matter in one step
- Legal insurance plans (ARAG, MetLife Legal, LegalShield, and more) as first-class payers, with claim submission and payment tracked per provider
- Consults and signings self-book on your calendar; card payments ride Stripe and reconcile back onto the matter
- A receivables board, no spreadsheet
Package · v3
Couples estate plan
$2,400
- Joint intake questionnaire×1
- Last will & testament×2
- Financial power of attorney×2
- Healthcare directive×2
- Revocable living trustoptional
Invoice payer
Client
Margaret & David Chen
Legal insurance
ARAG · member 84-2210
Claim submittedMar 24 · paid by provider Apr 28 · 35 days
Built for legal-stakes work
The record holds up.
The platform prepares and orchestrates; the attorney decides. Underneath, the data behaves the way privileged client work demands.
Eleanor Reed changed successor trustee
David A. ChenSarah M. Chen-Park
System stored executed engagement letter
Out for signatureSigned PDF on the matter
System republished will template
v3v4, drafts realigned
Margaret Chen submitted intake
14 answersReviewed before save
- Audit trail
- Every meaningful change is recorded: who, what, when, before and after.
- Tenant isolation
- Each firm’s data is isolated by default. One firm never sees another’s matters.
- Versioning, kept in sync
- Every form and template version is kept, and the matter, its drafts, and the fields they demand stay aligned to the same version.
- Custody and backup
- Executed documents store against the matter the moment they’re signed, and delivered and executed copies mirror to the firm’s own Google Drive.
Founding firms
Built with a working firm. Yours could be next.
Per Stirpes already runs one estate planning practice end to end: its intake, its documents, its calendar, its billing. We’re opening a small founding cohort of firms to build with next.
- A limited cohort
- We onboard a handful of firms at a time, deliberately. Every founding firm gets the attention a platform this central to a practice deserves.
- Direct access
- You work with the people building the platform, not a support queue. Questions get answers; friction gets fixed.
- A hand on the roadmap
- Founding firms shape what gets built next. The platform already runs a working practice; yours makes it sharper.
- Founding terms
- Pricing that recognizes you got here early, and stays recognized as the platform grows.
FAQs
The questions worth asking.
Short answers, honestly given. Anything we didn’t cover, ask us directly.
Does Per Stirpes come with will and trust documents?
No, on purpose. Your documents encode your judgment and your state’s formalities; a platform that replaces them replaces the lawyer. Upload the firm’s own Word templates, map their fields once, and every draft resolves from the client record. If your content comes from a drafting library, that composes too: the output is still a .docx template you own. And because the legal content stays yours, it works wherever you practice: your state’s formalities are whatever your documents say they are.
What does it cost?
One flat price per firm. Unlimited users, unlimited clients, no per-seat math. The right comparison isn’t other software; it’s staff time: think less than half the cost of a paralegal, for the whole practice. Founding firms get founding terms, and we’ll walk you through the exact figure at the demo.
How do we switch from the tools we use today?
Start with your next new matter; nothing forces a big-bang migration. Your templates come in as the .docx files you already own, and delivered documents mirror to the firm’s own Google Drive, so custody of your files never depends on us. Matters already in flight can finish where they are. And if you ever leave, you get your data out.
Is our clients’ data safe?
Each firm’s data is isolated by the database itself (Postgres row-level security), not by application code, and everything is encrypted in transit and at rest. Clients sign in with one-time email links, so there are no client passwords to phish or breach. We don’t yet hold our own SOC 2 attestation and won’t pretend otherwise: we’re a small team, the providers we build on are independently audited, and certification is on the roadmap. The full, plain-language account is on our security page.
Who is Per Stirpes for?
Solo and small firms whose practice is estate planning, and attorneys building toward that. If you’re moving into estate planning from another practice area, the platform carries much of the operating knowledge you’d otherwise assemble the hard way: the lifecycle, the intake, the ceremony logistics. If estate planning is one sideline among many, a horizontal tool will fit you better. We’d rather tell you that now.
What does “Per Stirpes” mean?
Latin for “by branch”: the inheritance rule that divides an estate along the branches of a family tree. For software built down one practice area, no name fit better. The full story is on why “Per Stirpes”.
See it run
See it in your own practice.
If estate planning is your practice, or you’re planning the move to it, we’d like to walk you through the platform, hear how your engagements actually flow, and talk about a place in the founding cohort.
One flat price per firm. Unlimited users, unlimited clients.
Priced against staff time, not software seats: less than half the cost of a paralegal, for the whole practice.
Talk it through
Pick a time that suits you.
See it move
One matter, start to finish.