Tax and Trust & Estate lawyers have always been a breed apart. They take their research tools and processes VERY seriously. And Wolters Kluwer CCH resources have defined the process of tax research. CCH launched its first publication in 1913 the year the US enacted its first tax law The Revenue Act of 1913. Anyone who has studied tax law understands the multiple threads of primary sources ( laws, regulation, revenue rulings etc. which are necessary for the interpretation of the law. A code section is only the first step in a complex analysis. And all of these primary law pieces are in a continuous state of change. Wolters Kluwer is leveraging machine learning and natural language processing to generate new tools and insights.
This week Wolters Kluwer launched an important new tool Estate and Gift Tax Plus to help trust and estates practitioners instantly track changes in laws and regulations with an innovative new tools for “redlining” and point in time navigation. Since the recently enacted Tax Cuts and Job Act was the most sweeping tax law in decades, trust and estates practitioners will need to track ongoing changes to regulations as well as interpretive and advisory materials impacting the practitioners understanding of the law. Wolters Kluwer expects their Tax Plus and Estate Tax and Gift Tax Plus products to help lawyers master these ongoing changes efficiently.
New Features Include: Point in time allows lawyers to see a law or regulation as it was in a particular year and redlining which allows a lawyer to track changes in laws and regulations over time. Annual versions of the Internal Revenue Code are available back to 1954. Years can be selected using a calendar features/ Regulations and Wolters Kluwer Commentary and Annotations are available back to 2016. Like the Tax Plus product which preceded it, the Estate and Gift Tax Plus is and upgrade to the Estate and Gift Tax Product on the Cheetah platform which is available for an additional fee to subscribers.
Senior Product Manager Anand Daga provided me with a demo of the product. Daga estimates that EGT Plus will save lawyers 40 minutes of their research time per session. Since every law firm is focused on efficiency, I recommended to Daga that they perform some systematic time and motion studies to validate and quantify the time savings for specific tasks rather than offering customers anecdotes and estimates.
Wolters Kluwer continues to leverage alliances with outside organizations to enhance their products. For Estate & Gift Tax Plus they have collaborated with software developer Proylon, which focuses on legislative and regulatory research technologies.