Quicken Lawyer 2003 Personal

I learned a lot from the program and was able to save several hours in legal fees when I was able to say exactly what I was looking to have accomplished.

It's a great product.

QLP is published by Nolo Press, a well established publisher of self-help legal books. QLP begins by walking you through a number of typical life-stage situations (i.e. young w/ no kids, married w/ kids, etc.) and comes up with a list of suggested documents and along the way explains why you might need each of these documents. When creating a particular document, the software writes all of the legal language for you - you do not write a single word of legalese - and docs are tailored to each state's requirements. To get information from you and have you make decisions about the content/structure of your documents, QLP follows the typical "interview" format - easy to use and informative along the way. My wife and I each created wills, healthcare directives and powers of attorney in about an hour or two.

PROS:
- Ease of use: idiot-proof interview format
- Legal help: good offline manual, good resources at Nolo website
- Clear execution information: tells you exactly what each document needs to be put into effect (some need notarization, some need just witnesses)
- Address book: enter a person's info (i.e. your spouse) and don't need to enter again in other parts of same doc or other docs

QLP is primarily estate planning software. It has a few of the most important ancillary documents (Child Care Agreement, Limited POA for Finances), but Kiplinger's Home Attorney and Broderbund's Family Attorney have a full complement of general use form documents. However, if you look through these lists, most are either not really necessary (Trip Permission Slip you can write yourself on scrap of paper or school gives it to you) or are better left to professionals unless you know exactly what you are doing (i.e. residential real estate sales contract and home services contract - too much legalese in there to just print, drop your name in and sign!?).

COMPETITORS: As mentioned above, Kiplinger's Home Attorney and Broderbund's Family Attorney have a more extensive list of docs (many of which you'll never need IMHO). Home Attorney came preloaded on my computer so had a chance to try it -- not nearly as user friendly, kind of clunky and actually makes you edit the document to enter your name, county, etc - this scares me. Don't have Family Attorney so can't comment on its ease of use, sorry. If you really need a ton of general use forms, get Home Attorney or Family Attorney - otherwise stick with Quicken.

GET A LAWYER IF: While QLP functions well as an advisor, telling you when you might need certain documents or even specific provisions within documents, it has its limits and is candid enough to admit it during the interviews/tutorials. Get a lawyer for situations like: you expect to owe federal estate taxes ($1.5 million limit in 2003 and going up rapidly), you own a small business or you expect to have a messy family situation upon death (i.e. an ex-spouse or children that don't get along) or live in a community property state.

I went through the process to write two wills this morning and it was amazingly simple to do.

You are asked questions, and if you don't know the exact answers you have the ability to go back at a later date to fill in anything you needed to research. The finished will comes with printed instructions on how to go about signing it and getting it witnessed, and why you need to do what you need to do.

This is all very well organized.