AI Estate Planning Advice in Georgia: Helpful Tool or Expensive Mistake?

Artificial intelligence can be useful for learning basic estate planning concepts, organizing questions, and preparing for a meeting with your attorney.

But Georgia estate planning is fact-specific. A generic AI answer may miss state-specific rules on wills, probate, powers of attorney, health care directives, trusts, intestacy, fiduciary authority, creditor claims, and family dynamics.

A recent federal case, United States v. Heppner, warns that conversations with a public AI chatbot may not be protected by attorney-client privilege or the work product doctrine, even when the user is discussing legal strategy.

Do not upload your will, trust, tax return, business records, family conflict details, asset schedules, attorney emails, or legal strategy into a public AI tool unless your attorney has specifically advised you that it is safe to do so.

The better use of AI is this: use it to become a more educated client, not to replace confidential legal advice from a Georgia estate planning attorney.

AI is the new Estate Planning “Second Opinion”

Artificial intelligence has become the new “second opinion” for almost everything. People ask ChatGPT or Claude to review contracts, explain tax strategies, summarize medical records, compare investment options, and even critique legal documents. Estate planning is no exception.

That trend is not limited to people trying to avoid professional fees. A recent Inside Wealth article reported that even high-net-worth clients are using AI to analyze their estate plans, suggest tax strategies, and second-guess professional advice. The article also flagged a more serious risk: legal questions asked to AI tools may later be used against the person who asked them.

For Georgia families, that should be a wake-up call.

AI can be impressive. It can explain what a revocable living trust is. It can define “executor,” “trustee,” “guardian,” “power of attorney,” “basis step-up,” and “generation-skipping transfer tax.” It can generate a list of questions to bring to an estate planning consultation. Used carefully, it can help clients become more informed.

But estate planning is not just vocabulary. It is law, tax, family psychology, asset titling, creditor risk, incapacity planning, fiduciary design, beneficiary coordination, and probate administration. It also involves sensitive facts that clients would never want aired in court: family disputes, second marriages, children with substance abuse issues, unequal inheritances, closely held business problems, tax exposure, prenuptial agreement concerns, charitable goals, and private health information.

That is where AI becomes dangerous.

The Problem With “Generic” Estate Planning Advice

Estate planning advice that sounds reasonable in the abstract can be completely wrong for a particular Georgia client.

For example, an AI tool might recommend a revocable living trust to “avoid probate.” That may be appropriate in some cases. But in Georgia, the question is not simply “will or trust?” The real questions are: What assets does the client own? Are they titled individually, jointly, in an LLC, in a trust, or by beneficiary designation? Does the client own out-of-state real estate? Is privacy important? Is there a likely family dispute? Are there minor children? Does the client need tax planning, creditor planning, business succession planning, or merely clean incapacity documents?

AI often jumps to a product. A good estate planning lawyer starts with the client’s facts.

Georgia law also has execution requirements that cannot be treated casually. A Georgia will must be in writing and signed by the testator, and it must be attested and subscribed in the testator’s presence by two or more competent witnesses. Georgia also allows a will or codicil to be made self-proved by affidavit, which can reduce friction in probate if the will is later submitted to the probate court.

Those details matter. A beautifully worded AI-generated will that is not executed correctly may be worthless. Worse, it may create a false sense of security until the person dies and the family discovers the problem when it is too late to fix.

The Family Facts Matter More Than the Form

Estate planning is not just document drafting. It is judgment.

Consider a Georgia parent who wants to leave one child in charge as executor or trustee. AI can draft trustee powers. It can describe fiduciary duties. But it cannot know whether that child is financially responsible, whether siblings resent the child, whether there is a history of addiction, whether the child’s spouse is a problem, whether the child lives out of state, whether the family business requires specialized knowledge, or whether naming a corporate fiduciary would reduce conflict.

Consider a second marriage. A client may want to provide for a spouse while preserving assets for children from a prior marriage. AI can describe marital trusts, QTIP trusts, elective share concepts in other states, life estates, beneficiary designations, prenuptial agreements, and joint accounts. But the correct plan depends on title, tax basis, liquidity, family relationships, real estate use, retirement accounts, income needs, and whether the spouse and children trust each other.

Consider unequal inheritances. AI can say, “You may disinherit an adult child.” But a good Georgia estate planning lawyer will ask why, whether the client has capacity, whether the decision could trigger a contest, whether a no-contest clause is appropriate, whether to leave a smaller share instead of zero, whether to write a separate explanation letter, and whether the client is being pressured by someone else.

Those are not clerical questions. They are the core of the work.

Georgia intestacy law is also often counterintuitive. If a Georgia resident dies without a valid will and is survived by a spouse and descendants, the spouse shares equally with the children, with the spouse’s share not being less than one-third. Many married clients assume their spouse automatically receives everything. That assumption can be wrong.

AI can tell you the rule if asked precisely. But many clients do not know they need to ask.

The Heppner Case: Why AI Chats May Not Be Private

The most important recent legal warning is United States v. Heppner, a 2026 federal case from the Southern District of New York.

In Heppner, federal agents seized documents and electronic devices from the defendant’s home. Among the seized materials were approximately 31 documents memorializing communications the defendant had with Claude, a generative AI platform operated by Anthropic. The defendant argued that the AI documents were protected by attorney-client privilege and the work product doctrine because they related to legal defense strategy and were later shared with counsel.

Judge Jed S. Rakoff rejected that argument. The court held that the AI exchanges were not protected from government inspection by attorney-client privilege or work product protection. The court framed the issue as a question of first impression: whether communications with a publicly available AI platform in connection with a pending criminal investigation are protected by attorney-client privilege or the work product doctrine. The court’s answer was no.

The court gave several reasons.

First, Claude was not the defendant’s lawyer. Attorney-client privilege generally protects confidential communications between a client and an attorney for the purpose of obtaining or providing legal advice. The court found that communications with Claude were not communications with counsel.

Second, the court found that the communications were not confidential. The opinion discussed Anthropic’s privacy policy and noted that users’ inputs and outputs could be collected, used, and disclosed to third parties, including governmental regulatory authorities. The court concluded that the defendant had no reasonable expectation of confidentiality in his communications with Claude.

Third, the court found that later sharing the AI outputs with counsel did not retroactively make them privileged. Non-privileged communications do not become privileged simply because they are later sent to an attorney.

Fourth, the court rejected work product protection because the documents were not prepared by or at the direction of counsel and did not reflect counsel’s strategy at the time they were created.

Heppner was a criminal case, not a Georgia estate planning case. It does not mean every AI chat in every context will be admissible in every dispute. But it is a serious warning. Courts may treat a public AI chatbot as a third party, not as a confidential legal advisor.

For estate planning clients, that matters.

How AI Chats Could Become Evidence in an Estate Dispute

Most estate planning clients are not worried about criminal prosecution. They are worried about family, taxes, incapacity, probate, and control.

But estate disputes are evidence-driven. If a fight breaks out after death, lawyers look for documents, emails, texts, notes, drafts, search history, financial records, and communications that reveal intent, capacity, influence, motive, or concealment.

AI chats may become part of that universe.

Imagine these prompts:

• “How do I move assets so my second wife gets less?”
• “How do I make sure my daughter cannot challenge my trust?”
• “What should I say to make it look like my father wanted to change his will?”
• “How do I hide assets from creditors before I die?”
• “How can I get my elderly mother to sign a new power of attorney?”

Even if the user had innocent intentions, those prompts look terrible in litigation. They could be used to suggest bad faith, undue influence, fraudulent intent, lack of capacity, elder exploitation, or an attempt to manufacture a paper trail.

This is the brutal reality: your AI prompt may preserve your worst phrasing forever.

People are casual with chatbots. They type things they would never say in an email. They test ideas. They exaggerate. They ask half-formed questions. They use shorthand. They omit context. They ask for “aggressive” strategies. They ask the machine to help them “win.”

In a courtroom, casual language can become Exhibit A.

That is why Georgia clients should treat AI chats about estate planning like discoverable written communications unless an attorney has specifically advised otherwise.

The Privacy Problem: Do Not Upload Your Estate Plan to a Public AI Tool

Many clients are tempted to upload their existing will or trust and ask AI to “review this.” That feels efficient. It is also risky.

A complete estate plan often contains highly sensitive information: names of children, trustees, executors, health care agents, guardians, beneficiaries, disinherited relatives, trust distribution standards, tax provisions, asset references, addresses, business entities, charitable gifts, and family conflict signals.

A trust may reveal that one child’s inheritance is staying in trust because of substance abuse, divorce risk, creditor exposure, disability, or poor money management. A power of attorney may reveal who has control if the client becomes incapacitated. An advance directive may reveal private health care preferences. A tax-planning trust may reveal wealth levels, business succession plans, insurance strategies, and generation-skipping planning.

That information should not be casually fed into a public chatbot.

The State Bar of Georgia’s AI resources warn lawyers not to input confidential client information into generative AI tools that lack adequate confidentiality and security protections. The guidance also advises anonymizing client information and avoiding details that can identify the client. Clients should be at least as cautious with their own information.

This does not mean AI can never be used in legal work. It means AI use should be controlled, supervised, and governed by confidentiality analysis. There is a major difference between a lawyer using a secure, approved, confidential workflow and a client uploading private documents into a consumer chatbot without understanding the terms of use.

Common AI Estate Planning Mistakes for Georgia Clients

1. Confusing Georgia law with another state’s law

AI tools often provide general U.S. answers unless prompted otherwise. Even when prompted for Georgia law, they may mix in rules from other states.

That can be disastrous. Georgia’s rules for execution, probate, health care directives, powers of attorney, intestacy, and trust administration are not interchangeable with Florida, New York, Texas, California, or South Carolina.

A client moving from California or Texas may ask questions using community property concepts. A Georgia client may read about Florida community property trusts or asset protection rules and assume the same planning is available or advisable here. It may not be.

2. Treating a revocable trust as asset protection

A revocable living trust can be valuable. But it is not a magic shield against the settlor’s creditors. Georgia law expressly addresses creditor access to revocable trust assets. If the goal is asset protection, tax planning, Medicaid planning, business succession, or estate tax reduction, the structure must be more carefully designed.

3. Ignoring beneficiary designations

AI may draft a will that says “everything to my spouse,” but retirement accounts, life insurance, payable-on-death accounts, transfer-on-death accounts, and jointly owned property may pass outside the will.

Estate planning is not complete until beneficiary designations and account titling are coordinated with the documents.

4. Drafting documents without funding the plan

A revocable trust that is never funded may not avoid probate. A trust that owns no assets is often just an empty shell. Georgia clients who use trusts need a funding plan: deeds, assignments, account retitling, beneficiary designations, LLC interest transfers, and coordination with lenders and tax advisors where appropriate.

AI and Estate Tax Planning: Where the Risk Multiplies

If general estate planning is a poor fit for AI, estate tax planning is worse.

Federal transfer tax law is technical, fact-specific, and constantly moving. The federal estate, gift, and generation-skipping transfer (GST) tax rules involve exemption amounts, portability, basis adjustments, valuation rules, deduction qualification, and a long list of statutory and regulatory exceptions. The “right” answer in tax planning often turns on numbers, dates, structure, and intent, not on plain English.

AI tools have several specific weaknesses in this area.

1. The training data may be out of date

The federal estate and gift tax exemption has changed materially in recent years. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, signed on July 4, 2025, made the higher exemption permanent and set a $15 million per-person base exemption beginning January 1, 2026, with inflation indexing starting in 2027 using 2025 as the base year. The estate, gift, and GST exemptions remain unified at that figure, and the rate above the exemption remains 40%. That single change rewrote the planning calculus for many high-net-worth clients who had been racing the clock against a scheduled sunset.

A public AI tool may have been trained on materials that still describe the prior sunset, the prior exemption amount, prior IRS guidance, or prior anti-clawback rules. A client relying on an AI summary may be planning against a deadline that no longer exists, or assuming exemption headroom that has changed in either direction. Tax law is one of the worst places to use a tool that may be confidently wrong about the current rule.

2. AI confuses state-level estate tax rules

Georgia does not impose a state estate tax. Other states do. A number of states maintain estate or inheritance taxes with exemption amounts well below the federal level, and the rules for trust income tax, decanting, situs, and creditor protection vary significantly from state to state.

AI is notoriously sloppy with state-by-state tax distinctions. A Georgia client who owns real estate in another state, who plans to retire to a different state, or who is considering a Nevada or South Dakota domestic asset protection trust needs a specific analysis, not a generic answer. The wrong situs, the wrong trustee, or the wrong distribution standard can convert a tax-efficient plan into a tax problem and, in some cases, expose the assets to tax in a state the client never intended to involve.

3. Sophisticated strategies are easy to describe and easy to get wrong

AI can describe what a SLAT, ILIT, IDGT, GRAT, QPRT, or charitable lead trust is. It can explain valuation discounts, portability elections, generation-skipping allocations, Crummey powers, and grantor trust status. The descriptions often sound competent.

What AI cannot reliably do is tell a specific client which technique fits, in what order, with what funding, with what trustee, with what distribution standard, with what reciprocal-trust risk, with what step-transaction risk, with what state income tax exposure, and with what coordination across the rest of the plan. A SLAT funded the wrong way can collapse under the reciprocal trust doctrine. An ILIT funded the wrong way can pull insurance proceeds back into the estate under the three-year rule. A GRAT designed without considering basis can save transfer tax and create an income tax problem. A grantor trust that turns off at the wrong time can trigger gain.

These are the calls that matter, and they are exactly the calls AI cannot make on its own.

4. The step-up versus estate inclusion decision is personal

For many clients today, the binding constraint is no longer estate tax. It is income tax basis. Assets included in a decedent’s estate generally receive a basis adjustment to fair market value at death. Assets transferred during life into an irrevocable trust generally do not.

That changes the analysis. With the federal exemption now permanently at $15 million per person and $30 million per married couple, many clients whose estates are well below the exemption may be better off keeping appreciated assets in the estate to capture the basis step-up, even if older planning instincts pushed toward lifetime gifting. A client whose estate is above the exemption may need to balance basis loss against transfer tax savings, and may need to revisit techniques designed for a smaller exemption environment. AI may default to “remove assets from the estate,” which was the right answer in a different era and the wrong answer for many clients today.

5. Aggressive tax prompts are especially dangerous in writing

The Heppner privilege concern discussed above applies with extra force to tax. Tax planning prompts can read very differently in hindsight than they did when typed.

Consider how the following prompts would read in an IRS examination, a state tax audit, a divorce, a probate dispute, or a fraudulent transfer case:

• “How do I move assets out of my name before a creditor finds them?”
• “How do I structure a gift so the IRS does not notice it?”
• “How do I make the valuation discount look bigger than it is?”
• “How do I shift income to my kids without it looking like a sham?”
• “How do I make my trust look irrevocable when I still control it?”

Even when a client meant something innocent, that phrasing can become an exhibit. Tax authorities have broad discovery tools, and aggressive language saved in a chat history is precisely the kind of evidence that turns a defensible position into an indefensible one. The line between aggressive tax planning and tax fraud is, in part, a line about intent. Do not put your intent into a public chatbot.

6. Numbers, math, and citations are not AI’s strength

Estate tax planning depends on accurate numbers: exemption amounts, applicable exclusion, applicable credit, GST exemption, annual exclusion, present-interest qualification, Section 7520 rates, valuation discounts, mortality tables, and basis. AI tools regularly produce confident, wrong numbers. They sometimes invent IRS rulings, Treasury regulations, or court cases that do not exist. In a field where the citation matters, a hallucinated authority is worse than no answer.

A Georgia estate planning attorney working on a tax-sensitive plan will pull the actual statute, the actual regulation, the actual ruling, the actual rate, and the actual exemption, and will document the planning file accordingly. That is not what a public AI tool is built to do.

What AI can reasonably do on the tax side

There are still useful, lower-risk uses:

• Ask AI to define a term (“What is portability?” “What is a SLAT?”) so you can ask better questions of your attorney.
• Ask AI for a non-confidential checklist of documents to bring to a tax planning meeting.
• Ask AI to summarize, in general terms, the difference between estate tax, gift tax, and GST tax.
• Ask AI to help you frame questions about charitable planning, business succession, or insurance planning, without giving names, numbers, or entity details.

Do not upload your tax returns, gift tax returns, appraisals, K-1s, trust agreements, valuation memos, or attorney advice into a public AI tool. Do not ask AI to recommend a specific tax structure for your specific facts. Do not use AI to second-guess a strategy your attorney and CPA have already coordinated. The downside of getting it wrong, in audit or in court, is much larger than the upside of a free second opinion.

When AI Can Be Useful

The point is not that AI is useless. The point is that AI is not your lawyer.

Here are safer uses:

• Ask AI to explain general concepts, such as “What is a trustee?” or “What is the difference between a will and a revocable trust?”
• Ask AI to generate a list of questions to bring to a Georgia estate planning attorney.
• Ask AI to help you organize your thoughts before a meeting, without including names, account numbers, private health details, attorney advice, or sensitive family facts.
• Ask AI to define terms you encountered in your attorney’s memo, without uploading the memo itself.
• Ask AI to help create a non-confidential checklist of assets you should gather before an estate planning meeting.

The key is to keep it general. Do not upload documents. Do not include private names. Do not include account numbers. Do not disclose attorney advice. Do not ask for help hiding assets, defeating family members, avoiding creditors, manipulating an elderly person, or creating a litigation record you would hate to see in court.

What to Ask Your Georgia Estate Planning Attorney Instead

Rather than asking AI to review your estate plan, ask your attorney direct questions:

• Do I need a revocable living trust, or is a will-based plan sufficient in Georgia?
• Will my assets pass by will, trust, beneficiary designation, joint ownership, or contract?
• Are my retirement accounts and life insurance beneficiary designations coordinated with my estate plan?
• Who should serve as executor, trustee, power of attorney agent, and health care agent?
• Should my children receive assets outright or in continuing trust?
• Do I need estate tax planning, gift planning, GST planning, life insurance trust planning, or business succession planning?
• Should I communicate my plan to my family now, or is silence better?

Those are the questions that lead to real planning.

A Practical Rule for Clients

Here is a simple rule:

If you would not want the prompt read aloud in a deposition, probate hearing, family meeting, or court filing, do not type it into a public AI tool.

That rule may sound conservative. It is. Estate planning deserves conservatism when the information is private and the downside is permanent.

Once a client dies or becomes incapacitated, the client cannot explain what they meant. The documents, messages, drafts, and digital record remain. A sloppy AI chat can create ambiguity where none needed to exist.

The Slowik Estate Planning View

At Slowik Estate Planning, we do not view AI as the enemy. Used correctly, technology can make clients more informed and make legal work more efficient. But estate planning is not a commodity document exercise. It is a judgment exercise.

For Georgia families, the stakes are high. Your estate plan determines who can act for you if you are incapacitated, who inherits your assets, who manages money for your children, who controls a family business, how taxes and expenses are paid, and whether your family has clarity or conflict after you are gone.

AI cannot replace a confidential attorney-client relationship. It cannot fully understand your family. It cannot appear in Georgia probate court. It cannot take responsibility for errors. It cannot promise that your private information will remain privileged. And after Heppner, clients should assume that public AI chats about legal strategy may not be protected.

Use AI to learn. Use your attorney to plan.

Final Thought

Estate planning is one of the worst areas to rely on “almost right” advice.

A will that is almost valid may fail. A trust that is almost funded may not avoid probate. A tax strategy that is almost appropriate may create unnecessary risk. A fiduciary appointment that is almost thoughtful may trigger family conflict. A chatbot answer that is almost Georgia-specific may be wrong in exactly the place that matters.

The best estate plans are not generic. They are built around the client’s assets, family, tax exposure, values, risks, and goals.

AI can help you ask better questions. It should not be where you reveal your private answers.