Trust & Will Review – An Estate Attorney’s Honest Take

If you have spent any time on Instagram or YouTube lately, you have probably seen ads for Trust & Will. The pitch is appealing: a slick, modern interface, state-specific documents, the basic estate plan in 15 minutes for a few hundred dollars. The company has built wills and trusts for over a million people since 2017, and to its credit, the product is a meaningful step up from the cheap, generic templates that dominated the online estate planning market a decade ago.

So is it any good?

The short answer is the same answer I gave a couple of years ago when I reviewed LegalZoom for wills: the documents themselves are not bad. The problem is everything around them.

Let me give credit where it is due. The product is well-designed, the interview-style questionnaire is clear-ish, and the documents are state-specific (which is more than you can say for some competitors). Pricing is straightforward.

They also offer optional attorney support for an additional fee per year, in most states (however, see my reviews of Legal Shield here as it relates to products like this that don’t let you choose your own attorney). The plans generally bundle in a power of attorney, physician/healthcare directive, and HIPAA authorization, which are mostly the documents most people need beyond just a will.

For someone with very simple circumstances (single, no kids, modest and simple assets — and definitely no unusual assets like foreign-country real estate, cryptocurrency, or royalties — straight-line distribution to a sibling or parent), Trust & Will will probably produce a usable will. Same for a young couple with simple wishes, no kids from prior marriages, modest and simple assets and so forth (“everything to my spouse, then to our kids equally”). The forms work for the situations the questionnaire was designed to handle.

Here is the part the marketing does not tell you, and the part where my professional concerns kick in.

Problem one: they cannot actually advise you on the law. Trust & Will is not a law firm. The platform builds your documents based on the answers you give it, but it cannot tell you whether you are giving the right answers, and it cannot answer follow-up questions tailored to your situation. If the questionnaire asks you a question and you give it an answer you do not understand the implications of, you are on your own. It can’t ask you “hmmm… are you SURE you want to do that?” and it can’t suggest “oh, you don’t want your kids to get it all at 18, here’s a trust structure with delayed distributions that we could use to take care of that.”

Their optional “attorney support” add-on gets you a phone consultation in some states, but this is fundamentally a one-shot conversation, not the kind of ongoing relationship a competent estate planning attorney provides.

The pattern I have seen with online estate planning is that people who do not know what questions to ask end up with a document that is technically valid but does not actually do what they wanted it to do. Texas community property considerations are a particular minefield here. So are blended families, special needs beneficiaries, business interests, out-of-state (or out-of-country!) real property, and basically any situation where a single decision in the questionnaire has cascading consequences the user does not see, but that would throw up a glaring red flag for us estate planning attorneys — prompting a follow-up conversation.

Problem two: if you screw up the document or the execution, you may end up worse off than if you had no estate plan at all. There are (at least) two common points of failure here.

The first is a defective document. If the answers you gave produce a will that contradicts itself, fails to dispose of the residue, names an executor who cannot legally serve, makes specific bequests that fail under Texas’s anti-lapse rules, or otherwise contains a latent defect, it may come to pass that nobody realizes the problem until you are dead and the executor is trying to probate it (at which point, of course, it’s too late to make a change!). At that point, your family inherits the gigantic problem, and the attorney they hire to clean it up will have no choice but to charge them several times what a properly drafted will would have cost in the first place.

I have heard it said before that “the cheap way” often ends up being the most expensive. Just so.

The second failure mode is execution. In Texas, a typewritten will has to be signed by the testator and attested by two credible, disinterested witnesses over the age of 14. To make the will self-proved (which streamlines probate enormously), the testator and witnesses also have to sign a self-proving affidavit before a notary. Online platforms produce a document, but they do not stand in your living room and administer the required oath; nor do they make sure the witnesses are physically present in the room, that they actually see you sign, that they sign in your presence and in each other’s presence, and that the notary does the affidavit correctly… and on and on. If the execution is botched (and it gets botched WAY more often than you would think), the will is invalid. Not “harder to probate.” Invalid. Do not pass go, do not collect $200. There is at that point NO WILL. Your estate then passes by intestate succession, exactly as if the document had never existed.

This is the thing nobody tells you about DIY estate planning: the worst-case scenario is not “the document is a bit weaker than a lawyer would have drafted” or “we can admit half of it, but not the other half” or “we have to call an attorney to come fix it after you’re dead” or “the court shakes its finger at you for doing sloppy work and then admits the will anyway because it’s close enough and they can tell it was you.” The worst-case scenario is that you and your family thought you had a will, and you did not. At all. No partial credit, no letting you slide by because you got close enough.

A few additional points from my research and from what other reviewers have flagged.

First, the trust documents Trust & Will produces are reasonable starting points, but the trust itself is only useful if you actually fund it. That is, if you retitle your assets into the name of the trust. Trust & Will provides some guidance on funding, but the actual work of getting deeds redrafted and recorded, retitling brokerage accounts, and updating beneficiary designations is on you. An unfunded trust is an expensive paperweight; the assets you forgot to retitle still go through probate. (I went into this in more detail in my piece on how much a living trust actually costs in Texas.)

Second, the platform’s power of attorney is a serious legal document with serious consequences. It can authorize someone to sell your house, drain your bank account, and take out loans in your name. Other reviewers have noted that the platform groups it under “healthcare documents,” which is misleading. Whatever else you do, do not click through and sign one of these without understanding what you are signing.

Third, the platform is not well suited to anything that is not vanilla. And what’s worse is that many people think their situation is “simple” and to them, perhaps it is — but legally, it’s not simple at all. Special needs planning, asset protection, blended families, business succession, tax planning, charitable structures: these all require thinking that a questionnaire cannot capture.

If your situation is genuinely simple, and you are a careful, detail-oriented person who is willing to read the documents, get the execution right, and follow up on funding, Trust & Will may produce a perfectly serviceable estate plan for you, at a fraction of the cost of an attorney.

If your situation is not simple, or if you are not sure whether it is, the math changes. The downside of getting it wrong is not “you wasted $499.” The downside is that your family pays thousands for legal fees to clean up a problem that did not need to exist, or (worse) that your estate passes to people you did not want it to pass to. Against that risk, the cost of doing it right the first time looks like a bargain.

I tell people the same thing I told them when I reviewed LegalZoom: a smart person, willing to put in the time and accept the risk, can get a usable result from these platforms. But you are paying for software, not for legal advice, and the gap between those two things is the gap between probably fine, if you read everything meticulously on the one hand, and terribly, catastrophically wrong on the other.

When you actually need a lawyer, you need one. Not a questionnaire.