Ensuring Healthcare Wishes Are
Honored: An Interview with
Randi Siegel of DocuBank

Ali Katz:
To me, any lawyer who is just offering estate planning documents, and that's it. You're putting in place a will, trust, healthcare directive, power of attorney, maybe a guardian nomination. You're failing. You're failing. You may be making money, maybe, but you're failing your clients. And because we know that that plan is going to fail, we know it. The person goes into the hospital. Nobody knows where their healthcare directives are.

Ali Katz:
The parents are in a car accident. Nobody knows where their guardian nomination documents are. They die. Nobody knows where their assets are. Right?

Ali Katz:
Welcome to the NewLaw podcast for entrepreneurial lawyers. Here at Personal Family Lawyer, we want to help more families and business owners make eyes wide open legal and financial decisions. But we cannot do this without you. Which is why we started this podcast, to find those of you ready to offer a better way to serve your clients.

Ali Katz:
So, if you are a legal professional who wants to help improve the legal and financial well being of your clients and offer a service model that differentiates you while meeting the needs of your community, and rest easy knowing that you are running your law practice like a real business, then join us on this journey by subscribing to the show and find out how you can use a new law business model to love your life as a lawyer.

Ali Katz:
In this episode, I talk with Randi Siegel of DocuBank. Randi has been serving entrepreneurial lawyers since 1997, and you are going to learn in this episode about a highly underserved and much needed demand for lawyers like you. Listen in, and I'll see you on the other side.

Ali Katz:
Hi, everyone. I'm here today with Randi Siegel, president of DocuBank. And this is a very different podcast episode today because Randi is not a lawyer, but has been working with lawyers since 1997, specifically estate planning professionals, and speaking at estate planning conferences, and has appeared in the media as an authority on registries and advance care planning. And really, today, what we're going to be talking about is the vast need for professionals, I would say not even just lawyers, but professionals across the board, to address the big crisis that I think we don't even quite know that we have yet.

Ali Katz:
Randy and I both know that we have. You may know that we have, but the big crisis that I think that the public doesn't yet know that we have around caring for our elders. So, Randi, thank you so much for being here today. So, first of all, what brought you into the world of estate planning and all of these issues related to how do we plan for elderhood? How do we take care of making sure that people know how we want to be taken care of. How'd you first get into it?

Randi Siegel:
Hi. Thanks. Before I tell that story, let me just take a second to tell your listeners what Docubank is about so they'll understand the journey. DocuBank is a digital registry for advanced directives so that clients advance directives of all kinds, health care provider, attorney, will, HIPAA release, et cetera, et cetera, can be available instantly at the hospital when doctors need them. So that's where I am now. How did I get there?

Ali Katz:
Well, and let me ask you about that before we talk then, about how you got there with DocuBank. You have been offering this service. I mean, I remember when I was a new estate planning lawyer. That was 1999 is when I graduated law school. I think I was probably at the firm. 2001, 2002 is when I first started hearing about DocuBank. Then I went out on my own. 2003, DocuBank was really the only provider.

Ali Katz:
Now there's more. So let's hear about how this all started, because you were so far ahead of your time.

Randi Siegel:
We were actually about 20 years ahead of our time. So my journey was fairly circuitous. I actually began doing health policy in Washington, DC, at the national and state level. My whole MO, and we may kind of get to this later, too, is that I like to understand how everything works and how everything fits together, which is why I was interested in policy, because I wanted to understand how all the pieces of policy interact to give us what we have or don't give us what we want and how to do that. But being in Washington and understanding health policy, and I was dealing with interacting with folks at quite senior levels in the federal government, I realized that there was a gap in my knowledge because I didn't understand how the healthcare system and how the healthcare industry worked. So instead of going to law school, which is what I had been thinking about, and I'd actually been a paralegal before as part of the health policy stuff in one phase. And I decided I didn't want to just do the law thing because I wanted to understand the business stuff too. So that may have been a mistake. In hindsight, I think I actually wasn't a great lawyer, but nonetheless, I went to business school, and I went to Wharton, that has a very developed program in healthcare management. And while there, I realized that to understand the healthcare industry, I really wanted to understand how hospitals work. So I went to work in a large academic medical center in Boston, Brigham and Women's, and had an absolutely amazing experience there. And I had a fellowship where I actually got to rotate all around the hospital and do all the things that I like to do, connecting all the dots, understanding the whole picture and how it all works. And then I went to work in a cancer hospital in Philadelphia, and I was doing hospital operations, running the entire outpatient ambulatory center, and doing strategic planning after that, and really felt like I had a good sense of all of that and was working my way to try to make hospitals better. And then I made a family decision. As things often happen, life throws you curveball. After my third child was born, I decided that I really wanted a job that gave me more flexibility than my full time in the hospital, everyday responsible position required.

Randi Siegel:
A few years before that, my husband, who is also in the healthcare field, had founded DocuBank. He was actually the founder, and we made a decision that fit both of us to essentially swap roles. I took over the business, and he went and did another healthcare type of consulting work.

Ali Katz:
Got it. So you had the secure full time job so that he could be the startup on?

Randi Siegel:
I was providing the health insurance and salary.

Ali Katz:
Right, right, yeah, yeah. And what was it that led him to realize that DocuBank was needed all those years ago?

Randi Siegel:
He was actually a nursing home administrator at the time. And this is when, in 1991, when the Federal Patient Self Determination Act was being implemented. And that is the law that requires all hospitals to ask patients if they have an advanced directive and to put it in their medical chart if they do. So his eureka moment was, he's implementing this at the nursing home and at the hospital in his nursing home, and he realizes, wow, no one has these documents available when you need them. They're sitting in the safe deposit box or in the binder, in the estate planning fold, you know, binder. And there's a business opportunity here to really make a difference. So that's how it started. So he had the vision, I took it over, and it was a logical progression, because there I was in the hospital every day seeing how healthcare decisions affect what happens with patients, sometimes the way they want, sometimes the way they don't.

Randi Siegel:
And I saw in all of my interactions with patients and in my meetings with the doctors and with the medical staff and the departments, that there's a real challenge for people to make decisions that are right for them in the face of unbelievable technology that's available. And some people absolutely want it all the time, and other people may not. And how that communication happens or doesn't really affects the experience that people have. And whether or not their wishes are honored on whether or not they even understand whether the decisions that they're making, they'll honor their aren't keeping their wishes. So it was another vector off this same idea of helping people get good care and the care that they want.

Ali Katz:
Right, right. And so you took over the business post third child, and you are now working with lawyers?

Randi Siegel:
So the focus of DocuBank has always been working with estate planning, with lawyers, with estate planning and elder law attorneys, because that's where the documents are created, and it's important to capture them at the beginning of the pipeline. Once the client leaves the office, they're done with their estate plan, they've done the signing, they're done. And it's really hard to get them to do the implementation, to register for something like this on their own. And even clients who didn't go through an attorney maybe did the documents themselves. It's just very hard. We looked any retail business, just almost any retail business that's tried or service, even nonprofit, that's tried to do this, retail doesn't work very well, gets very little traction because just the implementation hurdles are too high, and it's a little easier now with digital technology, and it's not front of mind. It's really the thing that matters is for the attorney to say to them, this is important. We want to make sure that people know your wishes so that they can be honored.

Randi Siegel:
And this is how we do that in our firm. So that's been our relationship with firms to help them actually make. And the description that we often use is to say, we want all your documents to work when they're needed. We want your trust or your will to work when it's needed. And this is how we make sure the advanced directives are needed, because this is one of the few documents that clients actually use during their lifetime, as opposed the after.

Ali Katz:
Right. Yeah. And that's one of the biggest things that I've seen over my past 20 years in the industry, is that when I first started out, and I'll be honest, I mean, most lawyers still to this day, are really not making sure that their plans are implemented. Most lawyers to this day are still just focusing on the one off transaction, getting the documents in place, but they're not doing the part that you identified is the most important thing. That is the thing that doesn't get done if people do it themselves or if they do it with a lawyer who doesn't focus on the implementation, which is to make sure that those documents actually have meaning and work. For a long time, I've been saying the documents should be free, especially today with technology, documents should be free. What shouldn't be free? What should clients be paying for - counsel about what goes in the documents, as well as implementation to make sure that the documents work. And that's really what Docubank is. And so I'm curious, what have you seen in terms of your journey with working with the lawyers to really get the lawyers to understand the importance of DocuBank?

Randi Siegel:
That's been interesting and really educational and sometimes challenging. Again, it also depends upon who you're talking to, and it works on a few levels. There are some attorneys that think about it from a rational perspective. Well, there are some who just only want to really think about the drafting piece and doing their little, what they view at least as their little corner of the universe, which is getting the documents done. And after that, it's on the client. I know that's not the approach that new law business model takes. For folks that are interested. Some hear it and understand it and value it as the kind of rational response to wanting to make documents available. Studies have shown throughout the years consistently that two thirds to three quarters of advance directives are not available for clients at the hospital when they're needed.

Ali Katz:
And let's just talk about what happens. Just so everybody that's listening that this is a podcast specifically for entrepreneurial lawyers, those who want to be, and this applies, by the way, to you as a human, not just a business owner. This applies to you as a human. So, Randi, you've seen it all. What happens when somebody goes into the hospital, cannot communicate their wishes and their health care documents aren't available? What's the reality?

Randi Siegel:
So the reality is the default. If someone comes in, especially if they're all alone and their wishes are not known and their healthcare directives are not available, they will be fully treated unless there's any indication to the contrary. So that's what will happen. And that is absolutely. Sometimes what people want, it depends upon why they're there, right? Usually if someone's there, they're a healthy person and they have a heart attack, and they're otherwise very healthy. Of course they want to be treated. If someone comes in because they're on their own and they say they've fainted or they've gone unconscious, and for some reason they're alone and they're at a late stage of cancer, then they may feel differently about it. So it's very situational.

Randi Siegel:
And a big point of advanced directives is to help try to deal with that situationality, if you will. I think I just made up a word. And the living will piece, as we all know, doesn't cover all of the types of circumstances that anyone would ever be in, which is why the healthcare agent is the most important thing. And naming healthcare agents most important thing. Being able to get in touch with a healthcare agent is the most important thing. So that is what a service like ours, or any digital registry, and there are multiple ones now will do, is, first of all, you want to identify the agent in the documents, obviously. And our emergency card, our wallet card, for instance, has the emergency contact name right on it, so that someone can be contacted even before you can get the documents downloaded or off the fax machine, both of which happen immediately, any. But just right away, you can know that.

Randi Siegel:
And you can also, the other thing that we have on the card is other important healthcare medical information, like allergies and medical conditions that could affect someone's treatment immediately in an emergency, because physicians need to know right away the most important things that will affect the treatments that they do or don't. You don't want to do anything that will do harm, et cetera. So that's the approach. And when someone's in kind of an emergency room, doctors talk often about the golden hour. You have, like, an hour if someone is, say, unconscious or unresponsive, and an hour and figuring out what to do and to do it. And so you really need access to the information quickly in order to get people working on it.

Ali Katz:
Yeah, I'm noticing all these innovations that I'm thinking of as we're talking to. One of my good friends is a caretaker for a man with dementia or Alzheimer's of some kind, and he wanders off. So they have an airtag on him around his neck and something, a tracker on his wrist that, like, he can't get off. And I'm just thinking about, oh, should we actually be storing this data not in a wallet. He may not take his wallet with him when he wanders off, but in the bracelet, are you looking at any kinds of innovations like that to move it out of the wallet and onto the body in some way?

Randi Siegel:
Yes. We're always thinking about new things. We've been innovating all the way along. Things like that are on the list, as are more phone based and app based things, as well as some other things that I'm not ready to share at this moment. But I will tell you, though, people do not always wander off with their wallet, but we actually have had at least one instance where we got a call from a local police officer who had found an elderly gentleman wandering around who had dementia. And by calling us, we were able to get in touch with his emergency contact and got him back home safe.

Ali Katz:
It's so interesting we do something similar to DocuBank, but for people with minor kids. Right. The kids protection ID card and the wallet. And I have to say that card got my wallet returned to me more times than I can speak of. I lost my wallet, but it had the kids protection plan ID card, and so they would contact my temporary guardian. And so it's really important that these identifying documents exist. And I'm just really curious, what would you say to the entrepreneurial lawyers that you've talked to over the years who for one reason or another had objections about including DocuBank? Right. Because really, the most ideal model is that the lawyer covers the cost of docubank. Right? The lawyer pays for it. It's included in their fee. Now we are implementing recurring revenue programs. I've been implementing recurring revenue programs since I had my own practice back in 2005, 2006. But now they're becoming really popular. Now people are seeing them. So now we have the family care program for our Personal Family Lawyer Firm leaders, and we recommend you just include DocuBank.

Ali Katz:
That's part of your membership program, your maintenance plan. But lawyers haven't always been a yes to that. Maybe we start, before we say, before we start with, what do you say to them? What are some of the things you've heard about why they work?

Randi Siegel:
The objections fall into a few different buckets. The first is that, oh, my clients don't need this because they don't travel. Well, you can need this in your hometown. When their family's always around, and they're not. They're just not. Or the other related one is they can always call my office. Well, if you do the math, your office is open 24% of the hours in a year. So, okay, so can your client call you at 02:00 a.m. to get their documents? Is that okay? Do you give them your home phone number, your personal number, so they can do that? Generally, the answer is no.

Randi Siegel:
So it's an ineffective, it's an insufficient solution. Of course, your office is open, so that's one set of objections. Another set of objections is, I don't want to take the time. You know, it's too much trouble. And it's actually quite simple. And there's just an enrollment form that can be, you know, the client can sell out or that can be programmed to just populate with your software and then you just send electronically. It's not.

Ali Katz:
And what kind of cost are we talking about? I know that we have a very special pricing for our Personal Family Lawyer Firm leaders, but what kind of costs are we talking about for a lawyer to build? Just build it in annually?

Randi Siegel:
So speaking generally, so we have a retail rate which is way, way more than the very generous arrangement that you've made with work for your clients.

Ali Katz:
What is retail rate?

Randi Siegel:
The retail rate is about $79 a year, I believe, per person, and it's way, way more.

Ali Katz:
Yeah, so this is great because then if a client goes to check the value, like they say, oh, I don't need to be on my lawyer's membership program, for example. Right? Because we're building this in as a benefit. So the client says, oh, well, I'll just go get this on my own. Well, okay, they're going to pay $79 a year, the retail rate, if you build it into your membership program. Our base level membership program is $50 a month, $500 a year, and you have a $79 a year benefit. Now, is that for a single person or. Okay, so that's for a person. So now 80 times, you know, to a couple, it's 160 a year.

Ali Katz:
You're getting like, oh, that's a tremendous value to the client. They get to see that retail rate. And now if you've built that into a $500 a year program, you're already a third of the way there to the value on that. And so to me, it just seems like an absolute no brainer. Like, of course you should be providing this to your clients. If you're an estate planning lawyer, especially if you're an entrepreneurial estate planning lawyer and you want to make sure that your plans work, then ensuring that your clients, their families, their doctors have access to these critical documents in the moment they're needed is what the planning is all about. Otherwise, why did you prepare the document? And so I'm very curious to hear what are some of the other objections that you've gotten so that we can help the lawyers who have these objections to recognize them and see where they're actually failing themselves.

Ali Katz:
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Ali Katz:
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Randi Siegel:
So the other objection is I don't want to spend any money on it.

Ali Katz:
Any money.

Randi Siegel:
It's money that's then not in my pocket. And the other answer to that that you began to allude to is that it's also a marketing benefit to your clients. And as an entrepreneurial attorney, one is thinking about that and thinking about how do I create value for my clients, both so that they want to retain me in the first place and so that they continue with me and continue the recurring revenue and feel like they are supporting me and they have my back. And the thing about a service like this, and I alluded to this before, it a), it's one of the documents that people will actually use while they're alive. So they will have an experience potentially they might, of using it and feel really grateful, but also know that they have that protection while they're alive. But the other piece of it is that, and this is, we could do a whole other conversation about this, but this is important. And I think especially will resonate particularly for attorneys that are working with you. And there's a real emotional piece to making healthcare decisions and spending some time on, even if it's not a lot, a little on helping them make healthcare decisions, talking about how important they are and helping them feel protected with DocuBank and through other things can really forge a stronger emotional bond with clients.

Randi Siegel:
And like, that's not everybody's cup of tea. But my sense is that for firms that are Personal Family Lawyer attorneys, that this resonates with them and that what this is, is another tool for helping forge that connection and doing the implementation and doing all the things that are not the documents that create the experience, that makes people feel protected and counseled and taken care of.

Ali Katz:
And that's really what it's all about, right? To me, any lawyer who is just offering estate planning documents and that's it. You're putting in place a will, trust, healthcare directive, power of attorney, maybe a guardian nomination. You're failing. You're failing. You may be making money, maybe, but you're failing your clients. And because we know that that plan is going to fail, we know it. The person goes into the hospital, nobody knows where their healthcare directives are, the parents are in a car accident, nobody knows where their guardian nomination documents are. They die, nobody knows where their assets are. Right? That's the other piece, right? It's like I remember I having clients who died and then I was like, I don't know what they own. I have no idea what they own. How am I supposed to help the family with the estate administration, we never created or updated an inventory of assets. It's like, you guys, this is what creates planning that works. This is what makes the plan work. And so, DocuBank, this is making sure that your clients documents are available when they need them. This is table stakes. And yet, many lawyers just don't think.

Randi Siegel:
And actually, the leadership of the profession has recognized this. The ABA actually has guidelines they've had out since 2019 on the role of counseling and other pieces. There's a whole process for how you help clients complete advanced directives that there's like seven steps, and it's well beyond the creation of the documents. But when I present this to estate planning attorneys, this is all completely new news, and people think it's just extra. And it's not my job to take the time to do this because it's important. It's definitely.

Ali Katz:
Well, this is, again, for you entrepreneurial lawyers out there. This is a huge opportunity, because the reality is that most lawyers aren't doing it, and the lawyers that aren't doing it will get replaced by technology, because technology will do it better than you can unless you retain the part of yourself that is truly human and cultivate the part of yourself that is truly human, that is able to counsel clients properly on what happens if you become incapacitated. Who do you want making the decisions for you, and how do you want those decisions to be made beyond just like kind of the standard, right? If we think about the Terry Schiavo case, kind of the most notable of cases around somebody who was kept alive on life support with a fight between her. I think it was her husband and her parents. The question wasn't whether to keep her alive on life support in the way that we think it was whether to keep feeding her, whether to keep hydrating her. And yet, in many cases, as lawyers, we're completing healthcare directives. We're not asking, how do you want to be nourished? How do you want to be? And then I had a situation with a good friend of mine, Jennifer, many years ago. We had not created healthcare documents for her because we never got around to it.

Ali Katz:
She didn't have many assets, and yet she had always told me she wanted to name me. She got in an accident, ended up in a coma, and I was in Egypt when it happened. And immediately her roommates called me because everybody knew that she wanted me as her decision maker if anything happened. And I got back from Egypt, went directly to the hospital, and met with the hospital ombudsman and her mom, and her mom ended up being the one that made all the decisions. And her mom said we couldn't give her CBD because maybe it was too much like THC. Meanwhile, Jennifer had been taking CBD all the way up until that time. But nope, we couldn't give her any CBD. We couldn't bring her smoothies in the hospital.

Ali Katz:
So now Jennifer's just getting the hospital food, which there's no way she was dairy free, gluten free, sugar free human, and now she's getting hospital food as she wakes up out of her coma. Like, this is not good for brain injury. We know as people were Boulder healer, community people. And then her mother is really monitoring who gets to see her. And of course her mother had her best interests at heart, but she didn't know what Jennifer would have wanted. And so as a result, I believe what ended up occurring is that Jennifer lost a lot of community in the process. Her healing took a lot longer than it needed to or would have had she been able to get the kind of treatment that she, she would have chosen. And I felt terrible, like I failed my friend and I to make up for it. I even went to court to try and fight her mom for control. But ultimately what I realized is that I was just costing Jennifer's estate money because guess who was paying her mother's legal fees? Jennifer's own bank account. So it was really sad and it had me really understand the critical importance of these documents, even for people that don't have a lot of money, maybe in some ways, especially because they have so much more to lose, relatively speaking, and then how much more in depth the council actually needs to be. It's not just about who do you name, it's how do you want to be cared for?

Randi Siegel:
And how do you even begin to go about thinking about that? And we have identified a number of really excellent resources that firms can use, that attorneys can use to help their clients think through this, ones that at the same time, because I hear this and totally get it, there is a limited amount of time that you have as an attorney to talk to people. As much as you might like to spend 2 hours counseling them just about health care documents, you can't. But there are tools that clients, that can be given to clients for them to do his homework, things they can read, things they can watch, that can help them make thoughtful decisions or preliminary decisions while outside the office, and then come back with their homework and then complete the documents. We have those tools available. There are no fee tools, and they're not tools that we've created. They're tools that we have curated and vetted from very respectable entities. Getting back for just one moment to your story about how do we nourish ourselves. I want to do a little segue about nourishment back to the issue around people with dementia.

Randi Siegel:
And as we know, the proportion of people with dementia in this country is high and rising. I mean, one out of every three people who's 85 and older has some dementia, and one out of every 9 people will develop dementia in the course of their lifetime. So that's a lot. And there's a whole developing field or body of documents called dementia directives, which we have a whole other conversation on, which is just a way for people to express wishes structured to reflect the course that dementia takes as a disease. It's like the only disease specific directive because it's so different than either terminal illness or persistent vegetative state, which are the two areas where living wills come into play now. And one of the things that dementia directives address that is not addressed in a traditional advanced directive of any kind is nutrition and hydration. And there are directives that allow people to say at different stages of their disease, which is the other thing that's different about these documents, whether they want nutrition, hydration, and to what degree? Do I want people to try to feed me to the point that some people would describe it as force feeding or almost installed? Do I want to be offered food? But if I refuse it, then that's fine, even if I haven't eaten anything? Or do I want to say that when I get to a severe stage of dementia where I can't do these things? X, y, z, I don't even want you to offer me food or drink, and I want my body to naturally take its course.

Ali Katz:
And this is critically important because this may be the only way that somebody can die, right, if they have dementia. I think in the. I don't. Maybe you can tell me. I don't think we have anywhere in the US where assisted suicide is legal.

Randi Siegel:
It is legal in ten states and the District of Columbia. And the term, if people want to look it up, that's being used in most of the legislation is medical aid and dying made, and it is being considered. There's legislation proposed in many more states, but it can be a slow process in certain states. And there are a few states now that actually have reciprocity, where even if you're not a resident of that state, you can go to that state, have physician's assistance and prescribing medication, but you have to be able to take it yourself. That's what distinguishes it from euthanasia, where a physician would dispense it.

Ali Katz:
Got it. Okay. So medical aid and dying is what you can look up. And this is something that's critically important to talk about if you're doing any sort of elder law planning, incapacity planning. And our Personal Family Lawyer Firms get paid more for this type of planning. This is highly lucrative planning. It is critically needed, by the way. So, for example, one of our Personal Family Lawyer Firm leaders in Florida, she charges a flat rate of $12,500 for incapacity planning to prepare. Whatever the strategy is going to be, to best ensure that the person, the family, the couple, whoever it is, will be able to qualify for the most number of governmental benefits in the event that long term care is needed, and to counsel regarding these types of issues around. Okay, if you do have dementia, how do you want to be cared for for the rest of your life? How do you want hydration and nutrition to be addressed? How do you want your life and death to be handled? Because most people do not want to be. They say they would not want to be in a situation where they're being kept alive in a nursing home and their family is spending 5, 10, 15, $20,000 a month indefinitely. But there's no other path. There's no other path because they haven't talked about it in advance. And if you don't talk about it in advance, the medical system is going to keep you alive, especially if your family can.

Randi Siegel:
And with the developments in some of these areas, legally, and it is a state, at least at this point, a state by state process. The counseling. There are two other pieces of that counseling. One is what state you want to live in. Do you want to move to a state where there's medical aid in dying? If you have a cancer diagnosis and decide that you don't want to stay alive after, if the quality of life deteriorates beyond what one is willing to handle? So what state do I want to live in? And that's an important conversation. Am I interested in any of these things? And the other piece is, where do I want to domicile? Where do I want to reside? If the kinds of things I was talking about with voluntary stopping eating and drinking, that's a term that people can look up if they want to learn more about. As VSED said, voluntary stopping eating and drinking, people can do that when they have capacity at any time, like you and I could stop eating and drinking tomorrow if we wanted to. Not that we have any reason to do that.

Randi Siegel:
But it's a whole different ball game when one is incapacitated. Like there is no state law yet or there's no court yet in this country that has affirmatively recognized the ability for someone to do VSED when they're incapacitated, and for the agent to make that decision for them, even if the person's put it in writing, you absolutely can't do it. Not absolutely. It is very unlikely that if one is in a nursing home or other type of institution or facility, that they will agree to it. And it has to do state by state with the definition of nutrition hydration. Is it medical care or is it basic care? And that's, again, more involved. I'm sure all your attorneys can understand it, but there is a chance to do it if that's important to somebody, if they're not in a facility like that. So there's planning around that, that counseling is really important for.

Ali Katz:
So these are critical issues that are becoming more and more common as we have. The population is aging, and there's a, I would say, and I'm curious if you agree, Randi, a shortage of lawyers who are properly trained and ready to meet this demand and proactively addressing it.

Randi Siegel:
I agree. It is not on the radar of, I think the majority of estate planning attorneys would be my guess.

Ali Katz:
Yeah. And attorneys in general

Randi Siegel:
Yeah. And I would say that part of that is about, it's not for necessarily, even for lack of interest, it's just for lack of bandwidth, in part, even if the awareness is there, lack of bandwidth. And that's where I think organizations like yours really play an important part in trying to systematize all of the things that can be systematized and where one can acquire the knowledge and the skills and the procedures by someone who's experienced and having worked it out already, telling you what to do, so that you then have time to focus on the things that only you can do, which is the individual client counseling and the marketing and making the connections with clients that are good for the clients and good for you as the attorney and good for your firm.

Ali Katz:
Right. And so if you have a lack of bandwidth issue where you think to yourself, there's no way that I could provide this level of counseling to my clients, then what I actually suggest is that you aren't charging enough, number one, and then you aren't hiring enough support in your office, number two, because when you're properly charging for these services and clients in your community will happily pay. They can't find the support. Right. So it's not an issue of you not being able to get clients or you not being able to charge enough. It is literally an issue of you not having the systems set up so that people can see you and know that you offer these services and then you charging the right amount because you are ultimately saving your client families so much time, energy, attention and money. And it might be that you don't know how to talk about it. It might be that you don't know how to do the counseling.

Ali Katz:
Great. Those are all the things that you can learn. So the thing that I would leave you with today with this conversation is, do you have a desire, do you have a desire to serve in this way? Do you have a desire to serve the aging population and their families and help people to make what we call eyes wide open choices about life and death matters? And if you do, then I see it as your opportunity, your duty, your obligation, your possibility to get educated on how to do that in the right way. Start charging for it in the right way, build in the right systems. Make sure that if you are already doing it, that you're not cheaping out because it's hurting your clients. You cannot just be putting in place documents, and that's it. That is, in my opinion, maybe not the opinion yet of the courts or anything else ethics, but certainly, in my opinion, that is malpractice. And at least in your heart, if you are putting in place plans that you know are going to fail because they're not going to work when the family needs it, when the person becomes incapacitated, they're not going to stay up to date.

Ali Katz:
Nobody's going to know where to find their documents. Their documents may not even have the required context for things like nutrition, hydration, dementia. How do I want to be taken care of if I do end up with dementia? If you are serving seniors and you're not talking about these things, by the way, if you're serving business owners, if you're a business lawyer and you're not talking about these things with your business owner clients, what happens to their business? I don't know. I see it as malpractice.

Ali Katz:
Unfortunately, it's common practice. Randi, thank you. Thank you for the work that you've been doing in the world of the profession since 1997. I'm really looking forward to the innovations that you're going to continue to bring forward.

Ali Katz:
For those of you that want to learn more about everything we've been talking about today, you can go to docubank.com. If you are a Personal Family Lawyer Firm and you are using DocuBank with your clients we negotiated you the best deal that you can possibly get, that you won't get a better deal from DocuBank, I don't think, in any other way. So make sure that DocuBank knows that you're a Personal Family Lawyer Firm leader. And for the rest of you, well, you can contact DocuBank directly and it's still really inexpensive. Be an entrepreneurial lawyer, charge the right amount for your planning, put in place an ongoing support program so plans work when the families need it, do the right thing and get DocuBank set up. So Randi, thanks so much for being here.

Randi Siegel:
Thank you so much.

Ali Katz:
I appreciate it. Yeah, I look forward to being here with you again another time. If you love this episode and the idea of serving people in your community at greater depth to truly understand the impact of incapacity and how to plan for it in the right way, well, you're going to want to join us as a Personal Family Lawyer. Go ahead and book your call with a law business advisor at newlaw.co/show and I'll see you on the inside.