Newsletter Q2 2025

ADAPT is excited to welcome Robert M. to our Development team as our new Manager of Software Quality Assurance. Rob is a big part of ADAPT’s efforts to improve our quality control and release management process. Rob brings a wealth of experience in software engineering and quality management. His focus at ADAPT is to rework our current QA processes and release management to help us improve our customers’ satisfaction in the overall state of our cloud-based solutions.

Before joining us, Rob played key roles in software quality improvement efforts at multiple companies such as John Deere, Daikin, Carrier, Honeywell, and other Fortune 500 companies. Rob has made a career in meticulously managing software engineering and quality groups in successfully developing products used worldwide – focusing on quality through the lens of the customer.

In his new role with ADAPT, Rob will be responsible for improving software quality processes – ensuring the customers are highly satisfied with the continued enhancement and improvement of our product. Our customers are critical to Rob’s approach to his work, and he takes extraordinary pride in providing the customers with the best quality product. We are confident that Rob’s skills and experience will be an important asset to our team. Please join us in welcoming Rob!

Maintaining a cloud-based solution where users can assemble a wide range of complex legal documents is challenging.  There are an infinite number of ways document packages can be assembled with 1000’s of variables affecting the look and feel of the output.  To make things even more complicated legal documents need to be regularly updated for changes in the law, changes in practice, reissuance of certain forms and of course changes caused by cost-of-living adjustments.   ADAPT has been working to improve our overall quality by investing in our product and committing to process improvements.  We are doing this in a number of ways.

Reworking our templates to make them easier to maintain and review.  For example, as part of our distribution redesign project we are introducing increased standardization in our interviews and distribution options to make our products easier to maintain and QA as part of the release process.  At the same time, these efforts will not only address a number of the bugs that have affected our distribution sections but will deliver more distribution options for our customers.

Expanding our Quality Assurance (QA) resources and improving our processes. We have added additional individuals with significant QA experience to our team to help us better automate our QA processes as well as to instill a better focus on quality as part of our release management process.

Enhancing Our Support Process. ADAPT has been investing in automating our defect/enhancement ticketing system so that we can better track and communicate on the progress of fixes and requests we are addressing with our development team.  This way we can keep our customers better informed of when tickets are being addressed and when they can expect to see changes in our software.  See our article below on our new ticketing system for additional info and when it will be made available.

Improving our Responsiveness in Handling Legal Updates and Changes.  ADAPT has further refined it’s legislative monitoring and update process to help us improve the quality of our work.  We are building on a number of practices that we began instituting over the last few years to better manage regular review and improvement of our legal documents.   These include:

• Subscribing to StateNet to automate the tracking of legislation and updates that could potentially affect our documents across the 49 states we support (all states except Louisiana) and DC.
• Having our legal staff attend several major estate planning conferences (Heckerling and NAEPC) and formally review the materials to help identify any potential changes needed.   More specifically, we also track some of the leading tax commentator’s work such as Professor Sam Donaldson, a professor at Georgia State University College of Law, to see if any changes in the law merit document modifications.
• Bringing more legal consultants in to help with research across multiple jurisdictions. These consultants regularly do legal research and drafting for us across several jurisdictions and help us create survey work that will help our quality assurance team be able to verify the documents are being produced correctly.
• And of course, relying heavily on feedback from customers to help identify areas where we may need to make changes and improvements in the product.

Much of our work of late has been behind the scenes in getting new staff trained, conducting reviews and setting up new processes.   But the plan is for you to begin seeing increasing improvements across all of our solutions in the months ahead.   While we have always been concerned about quality, our new changes and processes will make it easier for ADAPT to more consistently and transparently deliver better solutions for our customers.

As we have previously shared with our customers, ADAPT has been in the process of reworking the distribution sections in the interviews and templates.   This is a critical area of both our will and trust templates and one area that we very much want to build on and provide even more options to provide our users with better drafting experiences.

Our solution as many of you know was built off the Fore!Trust templates which worked very well in a desktop environment – it was however for the most part developed and maintained by one person who evolved the templates over time.

This historically resulted in a good, predictable product but one that made it exceptionally hard to enhance and update on a timely basis.   Because getting distributions right and being able to develop and deliver even more complex distribution structures is so important in serving customers, ADAPT needed to take a step back and rework the interviews and logic in this section.

Accordingly, this project when completed will provide several benefits:

• Make our distribution sections easier to maintain and manage going forward. This is critical not only for our current solution but also for our longer-term platform where users will have much greater customization capabilities both in content and in format of the documents.   It also helps us make sure we are timelier in pushing updates out.
• Provide users with more consistent interview experience. Our trust interviews currently differ more than needed between individual, joint and reciprocal versions and this has led to more user error as well as confusion as to what the templates can produce.  While we have already introduced several changes that have reduced a number of these inconsistencies, we are using our ongoing distribution work to further help improve the overall ease of use of the product.
• Inconsistency of options. Various residual delay scenarios have not been consistently available across all templates and all major types of distributions (e.g., per stirpes for 1 child, per stirpes for 1 child with afterborn, per stirpes for multiple children, non per Stirpes for several named beneficiaries, and non per stirpes for one designated beneficiary, etc.). This has been true of Fore! Trust historically as well as ADAPT.   Our current work is designed to reduce these inconsistencies so that options are consistently available to the extent possible and of practical value to our customers.

This effort has been a large one and it has required us to add several resources for analysis and testing.   But ultimately, we believe it will make our product significantly better for all of our users.   Our next release, which looks like it will be a few weeks away, is designed to comprehensively tackle all of the distribution issues users have been experiencing with our joint wills.   We apologize that this project has been admittedly a bit disruptive, but we know it will be a significantly better solution when it’s deployed.  Thank you for your patience during this project!

In our conversations with customers, we understand that there are areas of the solution to be corrected or improved. We value your feedback and need it to enhance the product continuously. While our platform is designed to accommodate a variety of complex templates, we are committed to addressing bugs and enhancements, this unfortunately does take some time. It can be challenging to ensuring that firms are well-informed about the progress on the requested changes.  Many times, these changes require review, validation with other practicing attorneys in the area, and requirements drafted for development and our quality assurance team to be able to check against.   All of these steps require time and coordination between individuals with different skill sets to address.

So that our customers can better see what progress is being made, ADAPT is thrilled to be introducing a new customer portal that will make it easy for firms to see how their particular issues are advancing for resolution.    Our developers have been working hand-in-hand with our customer service team to create an effective Firm issue tracking solution (aka FIT). With this new capability, firms that have reported an issue, update, or enhancement will now have the ability to track the progression directly from their firm admin user profile.

Once ADAPT launches FIT, all issues reported to the customer service team will be able to be monitored right from your account.  This will give all of our customers the ability to see progress and get a better handle of when a specific fix/update or enhancement will be available in the solution.  Be on the lookout for more details and a simple how to use guide as soon as the feature becomes available in the next few weeks.

ADAPT is genuinely excited to offer this level of visibility to our clients, as it’s just one of the many ways we’re enhancing transparency in the “bread making” process.  And while we hope that we can get your experience with our solution to be as bug-free as possible, we know you’ll find this new ability to track the progress of any issues you raise helpful in working with our solution as well as being assured that your requests are being addressed.

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