August 17, 2026 - New engagement documents, Document Selection redesign, document accuracy fixes

For Washington and Oregon users

A new Engagement Letter is available in both Washington and Oregon:

• The Engagement Letter opens an estate planning matter. It handles either a single client or joint representation. 

Three ancillary letters complete the family, each working the same way:

• Third-Party Payor Agreement — for matters where someone other than the client is paying the fees. It records that the payer is not a client, how much detail their invoice shows, and any cap on what they have agreed to pay.
• Conclusion of Representation letter — closes out a matter, confirming the work is complete, saying where the client's original documents are, and settling the fee position.
• Receipt for Original Documents — a one-page receipt the client signs and returns when they collect their originals, listing exactly which documents were handed over.

The interview has had a significant tidy-up:

• Document Selection is redesigned for Will, revocable trust and joint trust packages — a compact two-column layout grouped by document type, with separate Washington and Oregon versions so each state sees only its own documents.
• The Estate Plan Summary section list now fills in automatically as you select documents. Unchecking a document does not uncheck it in the summary list, so you can redraft the summary on its own without redrafting the documents.
• Boilerplate Choices is now organised into labelled groups — Administration & Investment, Beneficiary Notices & Reports, Protective & Tax Provisions, and Closely-Held Business. Each state sees only its own trustee reporting questions.
• A new "Check these before you assemble" list appears on the Assemble Documents page when something expected is missing — a Durable Power of Attorney with no Financial Agent, an ultimate beneficiary set to charities with no charity chosen, or a fiduciary list containing a row with nobody selected. Each item names the tab to go to. Nothing is blocked, and the list does not appear when everything is complete.
• The Family and Additional People lists now show each person's relationship in parentheses, or "(NO RELATIONSHIP)" where it has been left blank.
• Extra spaces typed before or after a name are removed automatically as you tab out of the field, in both the main interview and the client Questionnaire.
• The "Who should be included in the appointees?" questions for powers of appointment are now required, so a trust can no longer be assembled with an incomplete power-of-appointment sentence.
• Pour-Over Will selection no longer resets each time a single-person Revocable Trust package is reopened, and the Personal Representative and guardian questions that depend on it now appear.
• In the Questionnaire, clients can now tell you on the last page that there were questions they skipped or were unsure about. Sharing a questionnaire also has a new Password set by Recipient option, where the client chooses their own password.

Estate Plan Summaries received another cleanup:

• The Pour-Over Will section now appears at the end of the Revocable Trust section rather than at the start, so the summary opens with the trust itself.
• Mirrored Will and Joint Revocable Trust summaries no longer raise an error when the residue is split into separate trusts for each beneficiary, and their Guardians section now includes the Conservator sentence the other summaries already showed.
• Revocable Trust summaries now refer to the Trustee, not the Personal Representative, in the sentences about leftover personal property and about arranging care for pets.
• "Statements for Gifts of Personal Property" now appears whether you selected the Gift List or the Blank Gift List, and both options are offered on Document Selection for every plan type.
• The charitable-gift sentence now reads "If any of these charities no longer qualifies for the charitable deduction…"
• Raw template code could occasionally appear as text in the trustee list when a beneficiary's trust had several levels of successor trustees. Fixed.
• Sentences that read "for the benefit of the the Primary Beneficiary" or "due at the Judy's death" now read correctly.

Will, Revocable Trust and Joint Revocable Trust documents had a further proofing pass, again including corrections that only appeared for particular combinations of interview answers:

• Stray periods are gone. A sentence could end with a doubled period ("if she survives me..") or a period standing on its own ("who survive me. ."), in the paragraphs describing what happens to a beneficiary's share if that beneficiary does not survive you.
• A missing sentence has been restored. Whenever "Separate trusts at age" was chosen, the provision saying that a share for a beneficiary at or above the chosen age is distributed outright was being left out.
• The Retirement Benefits (conduit trust) paragraph no longer appears when the plan uses a discretionary distribution standard, or in any other case where no marital-deduction trust could be named. It previously printed with the trust name missing.
• Charities whose name begins with "The" — for example, The Trevor Project — no longer print a doubled article. Documents used to read "…to the THE TREVOR PROJECT."
• Trust names that already begin with "The" no longer read "the The Smith Trust."
• A cross-reference in the Revocable Trust could print "Error! Reference source not found" when the trust did not grant a power to remove a trustee. That sentence now appears only when the power is granted.
• Where a person's gender was left blank, documents printed "he/she/they" mid-sentence. They now read naturally ("…surviving them").
• A missing relationship now prints a blank line to fill in rather than leaving a gap that is easy to miss — "My ______, JOHN DAVID EDWARDS." The same now applies to the pets provision.
• For a widowed client who chooses not to include their late spouse's details, the family paragraph now reads "I am not currently married having lost my spouse."
• Spacing and punctuation were cleaned up throughout the Will, the Durable Power of Attorney, the Instructions for Funding and the Health Care Power of Attorney — including two sentences in the Health Care Power of Attorney that read incorrectly for clients without minor children.

Washington only

• In the Community Property Agreement, the Excluded Property paragraph no longer prints a stray full stop when neither exclusion has been chosen. If you have said that some property is excluded without saying which, the Assemble Documents tab now warns you — previously that paragraph assembled as a heading with nothing under it.

Oregon only

• Oregon notarial certificates now use the wording Oregon law requires and include the notary's commission-expiry line. This affects Powers of Attorney, Health Care documents, Revocable and Joint Revocable Trusts, Certifications of Trust, Community Property Agreements, Trust Amendments and Title Holding Trusts whenever Oregon is selected as the notary state. Trust Amendments also move to the shorter, current Washington acknowledgement wording, and the notary state list now offers Washington and Oregon only.