Arken.legal
Improving Estate Planning through Advanced Technology

Today, most CIOs of law firms are focused on enhancing business efficiency and customer experience. Private client services are often not given the priority they deserve and yet this area of law is increasingly under threat from competitors, including the unregulated sector, and new entrants, such as accountants. Estate planning and Will writing are important sources of lead generation and client retention for all areas of a law practice and, by utilising technology efficiently, can also be an important income stream.

Firms adopting digital tools to collect and share data will gain the edge by streamlining services and will also be able to support different customer engagement models to meet marketplace needs. Re-keying of data is a big issue in making the entire process inefficient and time-consuming, thereby affecting quality and increasing risk. “In fact, for every 100 Wills drafted, some 50 percent of the time is spent on re-keying data, which is massive. This is time that can be used for other productive activities,” says David Newick, MD, Arken.legal (UK).

To resolve these issues, Arken.legal offers a SaaS solution that provides quality content for estate planning document creation and speeds up the data reading process to deliver an exceptional user experience. “Our focus on the Will and Estate Planning industry allows us to provide industry leading expert solutions to enhance user experiences, productivity, and quality, whilst managing risk and compliance issues—improving profitability and helping users establish new business models,” he adds.

The company’s integrated suite, Arken, for Wills, Powers of Attorney, Inter Vivos Trusts and other allied documents, empowers law firms, legal service providers, trust companies, financial planners and accountants to establish and operate an efficient private client service. Wills are highly personalised documents requiring a range equating to thousands of precedents to satisfy from the simplest to highly complex of client needs. The Arken.legal team keeps the precedents up to date with legislative changes whilst its advanced automation engine ensures quality and improves productivity. Arken enables users to conduct a guided intelligent interview with end clients to ensure all the appropriate questions are answered and automatically generates bespoke documents in real-time, including complementary documents and forms. In addition, API functionality can be used to integrate and establish Arken within the user’s business processes.

The Arken interview can also record the reason decisions were made or instructions given, storing the responses with the interview to provide protection for the drafter in the event that the Will is challenged in the future. “Compared to MSWord-based automation, Arken improves drafting times significantly—by at least by 50 percent for a simple Will to 200 percent for more for complex Wills,” mentions Newick. At the same time, Arken creates mirror Wills, and other documents, automatically changing gender and relationships, but allowing any required changes to be made, which means that the review process can be focused on the client’s needs, not on grammatical risks.

Arken is extremely user friendly and intuitive and users can sign up and start drafting immediately. The Arken interface is clearly structured and help notes and advice are provided throughout. Arken.legal, caters to a wide range of users, ranging from sole practitioners to large corporates. "Our growth from 250 users in July 2018 to over 1,000 in June 2019 demonstrates the ease with which users can pick up and start using the system,” adds Newick. Arken.legal also provides training services for larger businesses that want to ensure that the solution is properly embedded into their firm and used to its maximum advantage.

Fueled by the move toward digital, Arken.legal has directed its future developments to help users to be able to work online with their clients. This includes an online fact find integrated with Arken Professional, as well as updating online bots allowing businesses to compete with digital competitors while being fully integrated to ensure the end client always gets the right service for their needs. “Following these, we will be extending the product breadth right through the end of life estate process, through into estate administration” says Newick. Geographically, the company will continue focusing on providing solutions in the UK, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand.