Planning for someone else

The problem this solves

Most engagements are about the client. An adult child bringing her mother in is not: the daughter signs the engagement letter, pays the bill, and takes the calls, while the will, the trust, and the powers of attorney are her mother's. Two facts that usually travel together come apart, and a platform that assumes they're one thing will put the wrong name in the document and ask the wrong person the questions.

So the platform keeps them separate. Representation says who the firm acts for. Planning for says who a piece of work is about. They're set in different places, mean different things, and a matter can hold several answers to the second while holding one answer to the first.

Planning for

You choose it when you attach a package to a matter. The panel shows Planning for with the matter's own clients already filled in, which is the ordinary case and needs no thought. Planning for someone else opens an ordered list instead: pick the person, or add one the firm doesn't know yet.

The order is not decoration. Position 1 is the first subject and position 2 the second, and that's how the documents fill their slots, so a plan for two parents comes out with the right name in the right place. You can reorder or drop a row before you confirm.

Once the package is attached, its card on the matter's scope carries a Planning for band naming who it's for, in order. Add subject on the package's menu adds a person afterwards, and it shows what that would add before it adds it, including the option to bring the matter's untouched agreed price up to the two-person figure.

What it doesn't change

Being planned for is not a form of representation, and the platform holds that line deliberately. Someone a package is planned for gets no sign-in, no portal, no email from the firm, no signing authority, and no share of the bill. They aren't a client of the matter and don't appear as one.

The matter itself is unchanged: still headed by the people the firm represents, still billed to them, still moving through the lifecycle on their engagement. A relationship between two people may explain why a family is doing it this way, but it never grants anything on its own.

The questionnaire follows the subject

A package planned for someone else asks its questions about that person. The intake it carries is created once per person the package is planned for, and the matter's primary client is the one who owes it, because they're the one the firm is dealing with.

Every surface says whose facts are being collected rather than leaving anyone to infer it:

• In the Collect lane, the row reads about and the person's name, next to who owes it. An ordinary ask says nothing extra.
• The questionnaire itself carries Answering about and the name, in the same place it names who's answering, and the task on the client's portal intake list carries about and the name too. The two are different questions and a client should never have to guess which one a question means.
• Opening the submission in the review queue shows About and the name at the top of it.

Two people planned for means two questionnaires, one about each. Answering one never counts as answering the other, and the matter isn't finished with intake until both are in. A package left on its default, planned for the matter's own clients, behaves exactly as it always has.

Sending a questionnaire about someone

Sending one is the same dialog as any other intake, with two things to know. An ask that's about someone else appears in the form list as its own row, about and the name, apart from the plain form, and it's the one that comes pre-ticked when it's what the matter is waiting on; ticking it sends that existing ask rather than minting a second copy. And where you want to point a whole send at a person, Planning for someone else? beneath the forms opens the matter's people and a search for anyone else. Every form in that send then collects that person's facts, and the recipients are still who gets the email and the link, with the client who owes the questionnaire always among them: the target is whose answers these are, the recipient is who answers. A form sent this way that had no ask about that person yet gets one; one that already did is delivered rather than duplicated. A send can't mix the client's own forms with someone else's; the dialog says so and asks you to send them as two batches.

Each outstanding row in the Collect lane also has its own Send intake, which sends exactly that ask, about whoever it's about, to the person who owes it.

The documents follow the subject

A package's document item can apply once, once per represented party, or once per subject. The last is how one package produces a parallel document for each person it's planned for, the same way per-party items produce one for each spouse. Each copy names whose it is on its row in the scope, in the Produce lane, on the documents tab, and on an itemized invoice, so a set of near-identical drafts is never a guessing game. In Resolve, the people a plan names, its successor trustees or agents, are grouped under the person they're for, For and the name, the same way a client's own chains are grouped under the client.

The population decides which edition a document generates, and the two kinds of item answer that differently. An item that applies once to the whole package follows the population: planned for two people it resolves the joint edition of an instrument that has one, planned for one person the individual edition. A per-subject item is already one document per person, so each copy resolves the individual edition however many people the package is planned for. Two parents with a per-subject will get an individual will each, not one joint instrument. See working in more than one state for how editions are set up.

Pricing follows the count rather than the item: where a package carries both an individual and a joint price, the number of people it's planned for is what picks between them.

Asking one question about someone else

Not everything arrives inside a package. When a matter already plans for somebody, adding an intake form a la carte offers Ask about someone else, which points that one questionnaire at a person from the same list. It's one link on the add panel and nothing else, so an ordinary a la carte add is untouched, and the link doesn't appear at all on a matter that plans for no one but its clients.

Where it shows up afterwards

On a person's own page, Matter involvement records that they're a planning subject and on which package, alongside the matters where they're a client or a named contact. It's how a firm answers "why is this person in our records" for someone who was never a client and never will be.