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Some estate lawyers are seeing Canadians consult a chatbot before meeting with them. They don’t mind, but they do warn: Just don’t let it actually write a will for you.
Meeting with lawyers is “stressful on a good day” and even more so when it involves planning for what happens after you pass, said Doug Higgins, an estate litigation lawyer for Hull & Hull LLP in Toronto.
While Mr. Higgins does not recommend people use generative artificial intelligence to make their own wills, he said some clients benefit from having more detailed and technical discussions after they have done the “grunt work” – such as learning about specific laws in their province or figuring out what their assets are – with the help of a chatbot.
Erin Bury, CEO of online will platform Willful, said her company has seen increased traffic from AI chatbots, and a higher proportion of traffic on its website from search engines is being converted into sales. She said this signalled increased intent from customers who researched their options with AI.
“What we’re not seeing is people trusting a legal document drafted by LLMs [large language models] and signing it blindly,” she said.
There is evidence that people are willing to use AI to plan their estate. In a recent survey of 5,000 Americans by Trust and Will, an online will company in the U.S., 30 per cent of respondents said they trust AI more than a lawyer, up 10 per cent from last year.
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Despite the potential benefits, Mr. Higgins acknowledged that AI could present similar problems to lawyers as WebMD did to medical professionals, where he said clients may come into meetings thinking they understand the law better than they actually do.
“There is that sycophancy problem, it’s pretty good at telling people what they want to hear so they’ll stay engaged on the platform,” he said.
Jordan Atin, a senior lawyer at the same firm as Mr. Higgins, is integrating AI tools in his legal software, eState Planner, to help clients understand dense legal documents through visuals and plain language.
Mr. Atin said LLMs are not yet predictable enough to be used for legal writing, as the same prompt entered five times could lead to five different outputs.
“Those little nuances matter to wills, and they certainly matter to lawyers,” he said.
Misconceptions people have about what it takes to create wills can lead them to using AI for crafting the document and increase the likelihood of a dispute, he said. Many people believe that they can draft a will and it will be valid as long as it has their signature, he noted – these are called holographic wills.
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While holographic wills are technically legal in some provinces – though they must be written by hand to be valid – they risk exposure to legal challenges and potential family disputes, Mr. Atin said.
In most provinces, wills also have to be signed with wet ink with a witness in the room. The witness then has to attest to being present when the will was signed. In B.C., witnesses can be present virtually and signatures can be electronic.
Hannah Solmon, an estates litigator with Scion Law LLP in Vancouver, ran an experiment to see if LLMs could avoid an issue that arose in a recent case in Ontario.
In the 2024 case, Mansour v. Girgis, a court had to rectify a will due to its ambiguous language about who would receive the author’s home under various circumstances. Rectification, a process where courts determine if a will needs to be amended to reflect the author’s intentions, can be an incredibly arduous process for families. In the Mansour case, the matter was decided 12 years after the author of the will passed.
Ms. Solmon asked AI chatbots to draft a will with a scenario similar to the one in the case. She found that wills drafted by ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot failed at using language that was precise enough to avoid grounds for a similar dispute.
Ms. Solmon also said she is seeing more people who represent themselves in estates cases using AI for court filings and correspondence despite the risk of “hallucinations,” where LLMs cite cases that do not exist.
Mr. Atin, who only advises on estate planning and does not litigate, said he expects a “gathering storm” over estates litigation in the near future as a result of misused AI.
