We delivered a personal AI estate navigator for a Mount Pleasant woman named executor of her father's estate — one that turned a shoebox of paperwork and a probate process she had never seen into a sequenced plan, drafted every letter and inventory, and kept a ledger her siblings and the Charleston County probate court could both trust

Three weeks after her father's funeral, a Mount Pleasant client came to the lab carrying a literal shoebox: his will, four bank statements from three different banks, a life-insurance policy from 1987, the deed to the family house on Rifle Range Road, and a note in his handwriting that said "Sarah handles this" — which is how she learned she was the executor. She is a school administrator, not a lawyer. The probate packet from Charleston County ran to dozens of pages of deadlines and defined terms, every institution wanted a different combination of death certificates and letters testamentary, and her two brothers — one in Texas, one three miles away — were already asking, gently but constantly, where things stood. The grief was hard enough; the project management on top of it was breaking her. We built her an AI estate navigator that took over the parts a clear-headed professional would handle. It read every document in the shoebox and built a live inventory of the estate — accounts, policy, house, the truck, a small brokerage account nobody knew existed until it parsed an old tax return — and then laid the entire probate process out as a sequenced plan keyed to Charleston County's actual filing deadlines: what has to happen in the first thirty days, what cannot happen until letters testamentary arrive, which steps can run in parallel. It drafted every letter — to the banks, the insurer, Social Security, the DMV — each one with the right enclosures listed, so she stopped making third trips to institutions that wanted one more certified copy. When the 1987 policy turned out to have a lapsed rider, it explained in plain English what that meant, what it was worth pursuing, and drafted the exact question to bring to the estate attorney — turning what would have been a billable hour of confusion into ten focused minutes. And for her brothers, it maintained the thing that quietly saved the family: a running, timestamped ledger of every estate dollar in and out and every action taken, shared to all three siblings, so "where do things stand" stopped being a phone call and started being a page everyone could see. Five months in, the estate is on track to close in roughly half the time the attorney originally estimated, she has not missed a single deadline, and the brothers' group chat is back to being about football. Her own summary is the one we keep: "It let me be his daughter instead of his case manager." The shoebox is empty now. She kept the note.