Death by LLM

Create an e-will with witness verification and signing.

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Inspiration

Without a will or a living will in place, most folks are subject to probate courts to determine how to allocate assets to loved ones. The process for creating a document is not new and has been automated with templates and forms, but those lack a certain amount of personalization. Utilizing language learning models tuned to legal will creation, it is feasible to prompt the user with wishes that can be incorporated in the final document.

The real challenge for many is the process of certification of the will, requiring two witnesses who do not have a vested interest (ie. they are not a beneficiary). By incorporating a real-time video stream and digital signatures the process can be streamlined to be more efficient.

August is Make-a-Will month, so with a better tool an annual tune-up becomes a bit easier and less expensive to make sure your wishes are taken care.

What it does

Through a series of prompts, you iteratively create a will. This uses a mix of templates and generative AI to build your custom document.

When ready, the tool automates the witness signing process. Most jurisdictions require at least two witnesses who can attest to the authenticity of the will. By inputing contact information, the will can have a digital copy that is validated by an e-signature. The legal validity of remote signatures also varies by state, so by adding a real-time stream that is recorded there is further proof of witnesses being present during the signing process.

This leaves a digital trail and recording of the participation of all parties to reduce the chances of future legal challenges.

How we built it

The web application was built using SvelteKit and Tailwind. The services utilized include:

  • Hugging Face Inference API using the OpenAssistant/oasst-sft-4-pythia-12b-epoch-3.5 model
  • Dolby.io Streaming API
  • Dropbox Sign API

Challenges we ran into

The rules for e-wills are complex and vary state-by-state which called into question the validity of the idea. Regulations are changing though with MN being the most recent to approve in August of 2023 the use of e-signatures for wills and the 2019 US Uniform Electronic Wills Act, so being forward looking the idea has some merit and is a matter of time before being recognized everywhere.

The Dropbox Sign API was easy to use, so easy in fact I quickly hit a throttling limit. The support staff jumped to the challenge to provide a workaround while doing development.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Finished a working prototype. That's half the battle.

What we learned

There were several new services used as part of this prototype and was also intended as a project to experiment more with building user interface components with Svelte.

What's next for Death by LLM

This is a prototype and offering legal advice online can be challenging, especially when it comes to wills. There are other documents however that may also benefit from this type of workflow and verification process such as Master Service Agreements (MSAs) and Statements of Work (SOW) that can help speed up the process of protecting all parties involved in a contract.

There are some corners that were cut and rough spots to clean up. In particular, the video / screensharing is a separate application that could be better incorporated into the same workflow.

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