Integrity Marketing

CRM for Estate Planning Lawyers on the Mac

If you are using a Mac in your estate planning practice, here is a great article about how one of your colleagues integrated the software, Daylite, into her practice for client and case management: http://www.applebriefs.com/2008/01/06/review-daylite-in-an-estate-planning-practice/

Here is what the author outlined as the primary requirements for CRM in the estate planning practice:

1. Manage contact information, including client data
2. Manage appointments and to-do items
3. Automatically create to-do items associated with each stage in the estate planning process
4. Keep track of all meetings and communications with each contact
5. Keep track of all documents associated with each contact

I would agree that these are the fundamental requirements. While I usually recommend TimeMatters software for the estate planning practice, this article provides valuable information for those who are working on the Mac platform. The author discovered, after reading the manual and asking some questions, that Daylite could easily handle these functions.

A single-user license for Daylite can be purchased for approximately $120 from MacMall: http://www.macmall.com/s?rch&q=Daylite&includeImage=true

 

Is Estate Planning Really Dead?

I read a column today, published in the Santa Barbara Noozhawk and available online here: http://www.noozhawk.com/local_news/article/111009_mark_cornwall_what_about_retail_wealth_spent_on_estate_planning/, written by an attorney, proclaiming that "the business of estate planning as an attorney has all but fallen off the face of the Earth. Business is dead."

Further, the columnist wrote: "I know this not only from personal experience, but from every attorney specializing in estate planning."

I won't even go into the incredibly poor journalism of that statement (Really? Have you talked to EVERY attorney specializing in estate planning???) ... but am interested in how REAL estate planning attorneys -- like you -- respond to that statement.

Please take a moment and leave a comment here -- if you are a practicing estate planning attorney -- and let us know how business is going for you. Is it dead? Steady? Booming?

Note: If you read the entire column, you discover that the attorney is actually pushing his own elder law seminars to inform and protect wealthy elders who are vulnerable, at least in part because they have disregarded proper estate planning. Certainly an interesting marketing approach. What do you think of THAT?