Cutting probate inventory drafting from 6 hours to 11 minutes
An Azure AI Foundry agent that reads estate documents, extracts structured data, identifies beneficiaries and assets, and drafts a complete estate inventory. Built in 4 weeks. Evals included.
See it working
Demo video — coming soon
Estate inventory drafting is expensive, slow, and error-prone
Probate solicitors in the UK spend an average of 5–6 hours drafting a single estate inventory from a will and supporting documents. The process is manual: read the will, identify assets and beneficiaries, cross-reference title deeds and financial schedules, classify each asset by type, and structure the inventory in the correct format. Handwritten wills, inconsistent document quality, and complex estates make it slower still.
For a firm handling 40–60 probate matters per month, this adds up to more than a full-time equivalent spent on a task that doesn't require legal judgment — it requires careful reading and structured data extraction. Every hour spent on drafting is an hour not spent on the parts of probate that actually need a solicitor. And errors in estate inventories create downstream delays, client complaints, and in some cases, regulatory exposure.
A 5-step agent on Azure AI Foundry
The agent handles the entire drafting workflow autonomously, with a practitioner review step at the end. It doesn't replace the solicitor — it eliminates the parts that shouldn't require one.
Document intake
Will documents, supporting schedules, and title deeds uploaded via the practitioner interface. Document Intelligence extracts text from PDFs, scanned images, and handwritten originals.
Entity extraction
The agent identifies and normalises key entities: testator name, date of death, executor names, property addresses, financial institution names, and account references.
Beneficiary identification
Reads the will to identify beneficiaries, their relationships, and the applicable inheritance rules. Flags ambiguous or conditional bequests for practitioner review.
Asset classification
Classifies each identified asset by type (property, bank accounts, investments, personal effects) and applies the correct valuation methodology for each category.
Estate inventory draft
Generates a complete, structured estate inventory in the firm's standard format — ready for practitioner review, not a first draft requiring major editing.
30 test cases before deployment
We ran 30 test cases across three document types: clean typed wills, handwritten wills, and edge cases (documents with ambiguous bequests, multiple property addresses, or missing schedules).
| Metric | Score | What it measures |
|---|---|---|
| Groundedness | 94% | Outputs traceable to source documents |
| Task completion | 89% | Full inventory drafted without human escalation |
| Entity accuracy | 96% | Names, dates, and references correctly extracted |
| Asset classification | 91% | Correct asset type assigned |
| Average latency | 11 min | Upload to completed draft inventory |
What it doesn't handle well
The agent struggles with three edge cases: wills drafted before 1970 that use archaic legal language and non-standard asset terminology; estates with more than eight separate property addresses (the context window becomes a constraint); and documents with significant water damage or degraded scanning quality below a legibility threshold. In these cases the agent escalates to the practitioner rather than producing a draft — the 11% of test cases that didn't complete without intervention were all in these categories.
What it's built on
We can build this for legal services, financial services, or any document-heavy workflow.
The same architecture applies to any workflow that involves reading documents, extracting structured data, and producing a structured output. Book a 25-minute call to talk through your use case.