An operating system built around the way trust and estate firms actually work.
Trust and estate practice is relationship work carried out over years, across families, advisors, and documents. Makase Law connects the operations surrounding that work so the firm can deliver a personal experience without an administrative second shift.
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Makase Law is an AI-powered operating system for trust and estate firms. It connects the workflows surrounding estate planning, trust administration, probate, private-client work, billing, reporting, documents, and long-term client relationships in one system.
Why trust and estate work is operationally different
Most legal software is designed around a case that opens, progresses, and closes. Trust and estate work rarely behaves that way. The engagement is one moment inside a relationship that may span decades and several generations of the same family.
Relationships measured in decades
A planning client is rarely a one-time engagement. The firm may serve the same family through updates, life events, administration, and the next generation.
More than one person in the room
Spouses, adult children, successor trustees, CPAs, wealth advisors, and insurance professionals are frequently involved, each with different information and access needs.
Sensitive documents and information
Financial statements, beneficiary details, health information, and family circumstances require careful organization and deliberate permission structures.
Mixed billing arrangements
Flat-fee planning, hourly administration, retainers, and hybrid arrangements often coexist inside the same firm and sometimes inside the same family relationship.
Matters that stay open for years
Trust administration and ongoing planning relationships do not close cleanly at the end of a month, which makes activity monitoring and follow-up essential.
Recurring life events
Marriage, birth, sale of a business, relocation, incapacity, and death all create new work, often long after the original engagement concluded.
Heavy information gathering
Asset lists, titling, account details, and supporting documents arrive in pieces, from multiple people, over long periods.
High expectations for communication
Clients expect a personal, unhurried experience during moments that matter, which is difficult to sustain when status lives in individual inboxes.
Coordination across many roles
Attorneys, paralegals, trust administrators, intake and scheduling staff, billing staff, CPAs, wealth advisors, trustees, and family members all touch the same work.
From first inquiry through long-term service
- Inquiry
- Conflict Review
- Consultation
- Engagement
- Matter Setup
- Information and Documents
- Drafting and Review
- Signature and Funding
- Billing and Payment
- Ongoing Relationship
- Future Life Events
Each stage produces information the next stage needs. When those stages live in separate tools, the firm pays for the gap in duplicate entry, missed follow-up, and status that only exists in one person's head.
Makase connects the sequence so a completed consultation creates the engagement, an engagement opens the matter, the matter generates tasks and document requests, completed work reaches billing, and the relationship continues after the invoice is paid.
Built around trust and estate services
Makase is configured around the services a firm actually offers, with matter types, stages, task structures, document requirements, and fee arrangements that match the practice.
- Estate Planning
- Trust Administration
- Probate
- Elder Law
- Private Client
- Asset Protection
- Offshore Asset Protection
- Domestic Asset Protection
- High-Net-Worth Estate Planning
- Private Foundations
- Business and Succession Planning
- Multi-Generational Wealth Planning
Makase supports the operational workflows surrounding these services. It does not provide legal advice and does not perform substantive legal work on the firm's behalf. Configuration for a given service area is confirmed with the firm during implementation.
A better experience for every role
Owners and partners
See workload, matter progress, unbilled work, invoices awaiting review, accounts receivable, and where matters have gone quiet, without assembling the picture by hand.
Attorneys
Open a matter and find the context: the family, the plan, the documents, the open questions, the last conversation, and the next step, instead of reconstructing it across systems.
Paralegals
Work from clear ownership and connected checklists across drafting, information gathering, signature coordination, and funding follow-through.
Trust administrators
Track long-running administration work, recurring obligations, distributions coordination, and the documents and communications each engagement requires.
Intake and scheduling staff
Capture inquiries, run conflict review, schedule consultations, and hand off complete information to the attorney rather than a partial message.
Billing and finance staff
Prepare invoices continuously from connected time, scope, and matter activity, route them for review, and follow accounts receivable with visibility instead of guesswork.
Firm operators and administrators
Design how work should move, adjust workflows as the firm changes, and improve the system using feedback from the people doing the work.
The invisible second shift
In many firms the legal work happens during the day and the operational work happens afterward. It is the quiet cost of running a practice on disconnected systems.
- Status updates written after the last client meeting of the day
- Document follow-up that depends on someone remembering to ask again
- Task coordination happening over text, email, and hallway conversation
- Time reconstructed days or weeks after the work was performed
- Billing review compressed into the end of the month
- Invoice preparation and delivery pushed to evenings
- Collections follow-up that never reaches the top of anyone's list
None of this is a discipline problem. It is what happens when the systems holding the work do not talk to each other, so people become the integration layer. Connecting those systems is how the second shift gets shorter.
Operational intelligence across the whole relationship
Tretis Intelligence is the operational intelligence layer within Makase. Because it works across connected firm information rather than a single document or a single conversation, it can help the team understand what is happening and what needs attention next.
Tretis does not replace attorney judgment, professional responsibility, or human review. Work it prepares is reviewed by a person before it reaches a client.
Operational coordination
Keep the work surrounding matters moving between the people responsible for it.
Matter summaries
Summarize activity and context so the team does not reconstruct history from email threads.
Follow-up
Support outstanding document requests, unanswered questions, and quiet matters.
Communication preparation
Prepare drafts of routine client and internal communication for a person to review and send.
Priorities
Help each role start the day with a clear view of what needs attention.
Workflow visibility
Make progress, ownership, and bottlenecks visible without a status meeting.
Questions from trust and estate firms
- Is Makase only for trust and estate firms?
- No. Makase Law was originally built alongside practicing trust and estate attorneys and their teams, which is why the workflows map closely to that practice. The same connected operating model can support other relationship-driven firms, subject to their practice areas, matter types, billing arrangements, and operational requirements.
- Can Makase support estate planning and trust administration?
- Yes. Makase connects the operational workflows surrounding both, including intake and conflict review, consultations, engagement, matter setup, information and document requests, task ownership, review checkpoints, signature and funding coordination, billing, and long-term follow-up. Substantive legal work remains the responsibility of the firm's attorneys.
- Can Makase support flat-fee and hourly matters?
- Makase is designed for firms that use a mix of billing arrangements, including flat-fee, hourly, retainer, and hybrid structures. The specific configuration for a firm's fee arrangements, matter types, and invoicing rules is confirmed during implementation.
- Does Makase replace existing practice-management software?
- It can. Many firms adopt Makase as their central operating system and retire overlapping tools. Whether a particular system is replaced, connected, or retained depends on the firm's data, integrations, practice areas, and requirements, which Makase reviews with the firm before building a migration plan.
- Can Makase work with Google Workspace?
- Makase Law is designed to work closely with Google Workspace tools such as Gmail, Google Drive, Google Calendar, Google Docs, and Google Chat where supported. Exact integrations, permissions, and scopes are reviewed and confirmed during implementation.
- How does implementation work?
- Makase works with the firm to understand how work moves today, map the lifecycle of a matter, configure the system around the firm's practice, connect or migrate existing information, train each role, roll out in stages, and continue improving the workflows over time. Timelines depend on the firm's size, systems, and rollout scope.
- Does Makase provide legal advice?
- No. Makase is software. It supports the operational work surrounding a firm's legal services. It does not provide legal advice, practice law, or make substantive legal determinations.
- Does Tretis replace attorneys or paralegals?
- No. Tretis Intelligence supports operational coordination: understanding activity, summarizing matters, preparing communications, surfacing work that needs attention, and supporting follow-up. Attorneys and firm professionals remain responsible for legal judgment, professional responsibility, client relationships, and final review.
Continue reading
- How Makase works with law firms
The implementation approach: understanding the firm, mapping the work, training every role, and improving over time.
- AI operating system for law firms
What separates an operating system from practice-management software, and operational AI from legal AI.
- Running a law firm on Google Workspace
How Makase connects firm workflows with Gmail, Drive, Calendar, Docs, and Chat where supported.
- Building connected law firm workflows
Turning individual task lists into a shared system for moving work forward.
See Makase built around your practice.
We will walk through how your firm works today and where connected operations would make the biggest difference.