Estate offices speak a compact vocabulary. The words carry decades of habit, and each one hides a small pile of clerical work that lands on a paralegal's desk. This glossary takes seven terms heard in a planning and probate practice every week and says what a drafting agent does with each. In every case the agent prepares and an attorney or supervised paralegal approves.
Funding
Funding means retitling assets into the name of the trust so the trust document actually controls them. A signed trust with an empty schedule is a common finding years later. An agent reads the intake questionnaire, the deeds and account statements the client uploaded, and builds a funding list: each asset, its current title, the step needed (deed, beneficiary form, assignment) and who owns that step. It then tracks the list as confirmations come back and flags the lines still open at thirty and sixty days. It does not decide how any asset should be titled. The attorney sets that, and the agent keeps the list honest.
Pour-over will
A pour-over will sweeps anything left outside the trust into it at death. Offices keep these because funding is never perfect. The agent's use for the term is a comparison: when the funding list shows an asset still in the client's own name, it notes that this asset would pass through probate under the pour-over will, so the attorney can decide whether to fix the title now. A paragraph in the signing meeting checklist reminds the client why the will exists and what it does not avoid.
Letters testamentary
These are the court's authorization for a named executor to act. Everything after a death waits on them: banks, brokerages and title companies ask for certified copies. The agent keeps a probate inventory that begins with what each institution will require, so the paralegal orders the right number of copies the first time. It drafts the cover letter for each request from the facts already in the file and leaves the signature line blank. It does not file anything with a court. Filing stays with the office.
Successor trustee
The successor trustee is the person who steps in when the original trustee dies or cannot serve. This is the reader of most documents the office ever produces, and often has never seen the trust. The agent assembles a trustee packet: a plain summary of the trust's distribution terms, a contact list of the advisers, the asset list with institutions and account types, and the first ten tasks in order. The attorney reads the summary against the instrument before it goes out, because a summary that is slightly wrong is worse than none.
Schedule of assets
Most trusts attach a schedule listing what the trust owns, and it goes stale the moment the client buys or sells something. The agent compares the schedule against the latest funding list and the client's annual update form, and produces a short list of differences for the paralegal: assets added, assets gone, values that moved. The attorney decides what amends the schedule and what is only a note to file. Nothing in the agent changes a signed document.
Beneficiary designation
Retirement accounts and life insurance pass by the form on file with the institution, not by the will or the trust. Conflicts between the two are a common source of surprises in an estate. The agent reads the designation forms the client provided and sets each one beside the plan's intent in a two-column table. Where a form names someone the plan does not, or names nobody, it raises a line for the attorney. It never contacts the institution and never edits a form.
Accounting
When a trustee or executor accounts, they report what came in, what went out and what remains. Families ask for this and courts sometimes require it. The agent sorts the statements and receipts the fiduciary sent into categories, totals them against the opening inventory, and drafts a schedule with the open items marked. The attorney or the supervised paralegal reviews every figure against source documents before the fiduciary sees it. An unmatched transaction is shown as unmatched. It is never rounded away to make a column close.
Why a glossary helps the agent too
Terms like these are the agent's working vocabulary, and a practice benefits from agreeing on what each one triggers. If the office says funding but means a different checklist than the one the agent was built around, the output will be neat and wrong. When PRESWERX builds an agent for an estate practice, the work begins with a walk through the practice's own terms and the document each one produces. Often the practice finds it uses a word two ways, and settles it before a line of code is written.
The pattern is the same for all seven. The agent does the gathering, the comparing and the first draft. The attorney does the judging and the signing. A family hears from the office, never from software, and every page they receive has had a lawyer's eyes on it first.