Patrick
A mandatory update put my clients’ estate plans at risk
I’m a solo estate planning attorney in California. Since December 2025 I’ve used LexisNexis’s California Automated Templates to draft trusts and related documents for my clients. On September 21, 2026, LexisNexis pushed out a mandatory new version of the product. From that day on, I could no longer trust what it produced. Trusts came out with blank distribution sections. Children I had entered in the system were simply missing from the trust. Provisions changed without warning when I regenerated a document. Finished documents had garbled text and missing names. In one matter, the trust said my clients had no children. If it had gone out that way, it would have disinherited their only child. I caught every one of these errors before a client signed anything. But catching them came at a real price. These families trust me with the most personal decisions they will ever make, and I wasn’t willing to let a single document go out unchecked. So for more than three weeks I read and corrected every page by hand. That meant many, many more hours on every matter and a lot of late nights at the office, doing the exact work I pay this product to do. I did everything I was supposed to do. I reported every problem in writing, sent LexisNexis’s engineers my files and sat through a training session that couldn’t fix any of it. LexisNexis confirmed the problems in writing. Then it announced it was only temporarily going back to the old version, with no timeline for bringing the new one back. When I asked to be released from my agreement, which runs through February 2029, LexisNexis said no. I’m writing this because other attorneys deserve to know that a mandatory update can quietly change what goes into their clients’ documents, and that if it happens, they may be left carrying the cost alone. If you use this product, read every page it generates before your client signs.