An Estate Planning Roadblock? Don’t Blame the Lawyers

John O’Connell was recently published on why estate planning really takes so long at most firms, and it isn’t the attorney. John says that before any legal drafting starts, someone has to reconstruct what already exists. That discovery work is where engagements actually stall, but it stayed invisible because drafting speed is a sellable demo feature and reconstruction friction isn’t. It’s also where the costly mistakes happen, since a beneficiary form that contradicts the trust is the well-documented path to estate litigation. He notes the Oasis Group’s research found the clearest differentiator among estate planning platforms wasn’t drafting speed but document ingestion and extraction, evidence that discovery, not drafting, was always the real friction. His advice is to audit where staff hours on an engagement actually go before buying faster drafting tools, since a quicker way to draft facts you can’t yet assemble just moves the bottleneck one step later.