How to Start a Solo Estate Planning Practice in 2026: The Software & Workflow Checklist

You passed the bar, you have a few referral sources, and you want to hang your own shingle doing wills and trusts. Good. Estate planning is one of the better niches to go solo in: the work is mostly flat-fee, the documents are repeatable, and a single attorney can serve a real book of business without a back office. But the first ninety days are where most new solos either build a clean foundation or quietly create the mess they will be untangling two years later.

This is a practical checklist for launching, focused on the operational stack and the day-to-day workflow. It will not tell you which living trust clause to use. It will tell you how to get from a signed engagement letter to a billed, signed, stored estate plan without buying four tools you do not need.

The reality of going solo in estate planning

Going solo is not really a legal problem. You already know how to draft a will. The hard part is that you are now also the bookkeeper, the intake coordinator, the IT department, and the person responsible for not commingling client funds. Every hour you spend wrestling with disconnected software is an hour you are not drafting or meeting clients.

The good news: estate planning is unusually friendly to a lean setup. Your matters follow a predictable shape. Most engagements are flat fee, which means billing is simple. You rarely hold large balances in trust, but when you do, the bar expects it handled perfectly. So the goal of your launch stack is boring on purpose: as few moving parts as possible, with trust accounting that survives an audit.

Legal & admin setup (quick)

Handle the formalities first. None of this takes long, but skipping a step here causes pain later.

• Form your entity. A single-member PLLC or PC is typical for a solo, but your state bar has rules on what business form attorneys may use. Check before you file.
• Get malpractice insurance. Bind a professional liability policy before you take your first client. Estate planning claims tend to surface years later (a beneficiary disputes a trust), so tail coverage matters. Shop two or three carriers.
• Open an IOLTA trust account. Open a separate IOLTA (or non-interest trust account where applicable) at a bank approved by your state bar foundation. This is distinct from your operating account, and the two must never touch. Order checks and a deposit stamp.
• Learn your trust accounting rules cold. Every state bar publishes trust handling rules: retainers go into trust, you only withdraw earned fees, you reconcile monthly, and you keep a ledger per client. Read your jurisdiction’s version once, carefully. This is the rule most likely to end a career when ignored.
• Set up the basics. Business bank account, a domain and email that is not gmail, a simple website, and a calendar you can share for client meetings.

The software trap (and the fix)

Here is where most new solos overspend and overcomplicate. The instinct is to buy a best-in-class tool for each job: a drafting engine, a practice management system, an e-signature service, and accounting software for trust. Four logins, four bills, four places your client data lives, and a lot of copy-pasting between them.

For a brand-new solo, that stack is both expensive and fragile. You end up exporting a draft from one system, uploading it to another to get signed, then manually moving the fee from trust to operating in a third. Every handoff is a chance to make a mistake, and the trust-accounting handoff is the one you cannot afford to get wrong.

The fix is to start with one platform that covers the whole loop and only add specialized tools later if you actually outgrow it. Here is the cost comparison most solos never run before signing up:

ContractKit was built for exactly this: AI estate drafting (wills, revocable living trusts, powers of attorney, advance directives, and engagement letters), IOLTA trust accounting with separate ledgers and no-overdraw protection, matters, time tracking, flat-fee and hourly invoicing, and a client portal with built-in e-sign. It is $49/mo flat for solos, month-to-month, with a 14-day trial and no card required. If you later need a feature WealthCounsel has that you genuinely miss, you can read our honest comparison with WealthCounsel and decide then — but most solos never reach that point.

Your end-to-end client workflow

Once the tools are sorted, build one repeatable path that every estate planning client travels. Repeatability is what lets a solo handle volume without dropping balls. Here is the full loop, step by step.

1. Intake. Capture the prospective client’s information through a simple form or a short call: family situation, assets, goals, who they want as fiduciaries. Create the matter.
2. Conflict check. Before you do any substantive work, run a conflict check against your existing clients and adverse parties. In estate planning this matters more than people expect — spouses, business partners, and beneficiaries can all pull in different directions.
3. Engagement letter. Send a clear engagement letter that states scope (will-based plan vs. trust-based plan), the flat fee, and what is excluded. Get it signed before drafting. See our estate planning engagement letter template for a starting point.
4. Collect the retainer into trust. If you take any advance fee, it goes into your IOLTA account and is tracked on that client’s ledger. You do not touch it until it is earned.
5. Draft the plan. Generate the will, revocable living trust, durable power of attorney, and advance directive. With AI drafting, you produce a clean first draft in minutes and spend your time on judgment, not formatting.
6. Review meeting. Walk the client through the documents in plain language. Capture their edits, revise, and confirm the final version.
7. E-sign or execute. Send the final documents to the client portal for review and signing. Note: some states still require wet-ink execution and witnesses for wills, so confirm what your jurisdiction allows before relying on electronic signatures for the will itself.
8. Store. Keep the executed plan and the full matter history in one place — documents, notes, and the signed engagement letter together.
9. Bill and move earned fees. Issue the invoice, apply the earned portion of the retainer, and transfer earned fees from trust to your operating account with a clear record of the movement.

When all nine steps live in one system, the matter carries its own context. The fee you transfer out of trust is tied to the invoice, which is tied to the matter, which holds the signed documents. Nothing is stranded in a separate app.

Keeping trust accounting clean from day one

If there is one thing that ends solo careers, it is sloppy trust accounting. Bar discipline for commingling or overdrawing a client’s trust funds is severe, and ignorance is not a defense. The defense is a system that makes the wrong move hard.

Set these habits on day one, not after your first audit:

• One ledger per client. Every client with money in trust gets their own running ledger. You should always be able to say exactly how much of the trust balance belongs to whom.
• Never overdraw a client. You can only spend a client’s money on that client. A system with no-overdraw protection blocks the single most common fatal mistake before it happens.
• Reconcile monthly. Match your trust ledger to the bank statement every month. Three-way reconciliation (bank, ledger total, sum of client balances) is the standard most bars expect.
• Keep an audit trail. Every deposit and withdrawal should be timestamped and tied to a matter, so you can reconstruct any transaction years later.
• Only move earned fees. Money leaves trust only when you have earned it and invoiced it. Transfer it deliberately, with a record.

ContractKit’s trust accounting enforces separate ledgers, no-overdraw, and a full audit trail by design, which means the clean path is also the default path. That is the whole point of using software for this instead of a spreadsheet that lets you do anything.

First-90-days checklist

Work this list in order. Most of it is one-time setup; the last few items become your weekly rhythm.

• Form your PLLC/PC and confirm it complies with your state bar.
• Bind malpractice insurance before taking a single client.
• Open your IOLTA trust account at an approved bank; order checks.
• Read your state bar’s trust accounting rules end to end.
• Open a separate operating account; keep it strictly apart from trust.
• Stand up a simple website and professional email.
• Pick one platform for drafting, matters, billing, e-sign, and trust — start the 14-day trial.
• Build your engagement letter and a will/trust intake form as reusable templates.
• Define your flat-fee packages (will-based plan, trust-based plan) and write them down.
• Run your first matter through all nine workflow steps to find the rough edges.
• Set a recurring monthly trust reconciliation on your calendar.
• Line up two or three referral sources (financial advisors, CPAs, realtors).

Frequently asked questions

How much does it cost to start a solo estate planning practice?

Less than most new attorneys fear, if you keep the software lean. Your real fixed costs are entity formation, malpractice insurance, and your bank accounts. Software can be the line item that quietly balloons — a cobbled drafting-plus-billing-plus-e-sign-plus-accounting stack runs $650–$1,000+ a month, while a single platform like ContractKit Solo is $49/mo. Start lean and add tools only when you have the revenue and a concrete reason.

Do I really need WealthCounsel to draft estate plans?

No. WealthCounsel is a respected drafting library, but at roughly $500/mo on an annual contract with no trial, it is a heavy commitment for a brand-new solo — and it only does drafting. You still need separate billing, e-sign, and trust accounting around it. An all-in-one platform with AI drafting covers the document generation plus everything else for a fraction of the cost. Compare them side by side before you sign anything annual.

Can I use one tool for trust accounting and billing?

Yes, and you should. Splitting trust accounting into a generic tool like QuickBooks forces you to configure trust rules manually and reconcile across systems. A platform that handles IOLTA natively — separate ledgers, no-overdraw, audit trail — alongside your invoicing keeps earned-fee transfers tied to the actual invoice and matter, which is exactly what a bar auditor wants to see.

How long until I can take my first client?

Once your entity, insurance, and trust account are in place, you can take a client. Realistically that is a few weeks, gated by how fast the bank opens your IOLTA and your carrier binds coverage. Set up your software and templates in parallel so that when the first client appears, your workflow is already built.