Your clients plan with you, not with their doctor.
CareGoals is the values conversation to hand a client before the meeting where the health care proxy and directive are drafted and signed. They have it on their own phone with the person they would name: who speaks for them, how much room that person has, the care they’d want, and what matters most. Nothing is typed. They bring you their words. The form, the counsel and the signing stay yours.
In two U.S. studies, 49 to 76 percent of patients said they had done advance care planning with a lawyer. Six to seven percent said they had done it with a physician. The planning happens in your office. The crisis happens in theirs, and the research notes that the signed forms are usually at home or at the lawyer’s office, not at the bedside.
Hooper, Sabatino & Sudore, Improving Medical-Legal Advance Care Planning, Journal of Pain and Symptom Management 2020;60(2):487The guide for lawyers already describes this conversation.
In 2019 the ABA Commission on Law and Aging, with the American Academy of Hospice and Palliative Medicine and UCSF, published Advance Directives: Counseling Guide for Lawyers: eight shared principles and a checklist for the client meetings. CareGoals is built to do the part the guide says the client should do on their own, before they pay for your time.
Proxy first yours
The guide calls careful selection and appointment of a health care agent the most important legal component. The first thing CareGoals asks is who is sitting with the client; the document names who would speak for them and whether that person has been told.
Values, goals and priorities, not hypotheticals the cards
Principle 3: focus on values in the event of worsening health rather than specific treatments for distant situations. The cards run values first, then outcomes, then treatments, in that order.
A tool the client uses on their own the cards
The guide says an extended meeting with counsel is not something most clients will pay for, and recommends offering a planning tool to use alone and with family. About 20 minutes, no account, nothing to buy, saved only on their device.
Enough flexibility for the agent yours
Principle 5: the directive should leave room for the surrogate to respond to new circumstances. One card asks exactly that: follow my words, use them as a guide, or I trust them to decide. You draft from the answer.
Share it, and get it into the medical record yours, with the clinician
Principle 7. The research found most lawyers urge clients to share the document and few have a routine for it. The summary page shares the Care Wishes by link, prints a visit packet for the clinician, and puts a copy on the client’s phone in one tap. The guide’s sample letter to the physician is yours to send.
Serious illness goes to the clinician the clinician
Principle 6: once a diagnosis is serious, specific treatment preferences and medical orders such as a POLST belong with the client’s own clinician. CareGoals says the same on every page, and has a page for clinicians.
What CareGoals does not do: draft or tailor the state form, advise on witnesses or notarization, or know the client’s estate plan. That is the practice of law, and it stays with you. If your firm’s AI drafts the proxy from their words, LawyerSwipe is the review record: the draft checked against the client’s exact words, and the lawyer at the firm who signed, modified or declined it.
The thinking happens at the kitchen table. The drafting happens with you.
They do the cards with the person they would name
Fifteen cards, one at a time, every answer a tap, on the client’s own phone, with the proposed agent beside them. On the treatment and CPR cards the agent guesses first, then the client answers, and the screen shows both so they talk about any difference. About 20 minutes. Nothing leaves the device.
You start from their words, not a blank form
They bring the printed Care Wishes document: who speaks for them, how much room that person has, their preference if seriously ill and not expected to recover, CPR, what they would not want, and what comfort means to them. You draft the proxy and the directive from it. The state’s form, your language and the execution stay exactly as they are.
The signed form gets a bedside copy
The client adds a photo of the signed form to the ComfortCard family file on their phone, beside the Care Wishes, and prints the wallet card from Make sure it’s found: where the original is, and who to call. The summary page sets a yearly reminder to reread it.
The evidence for getting it right is a facilitated conversation with the agent in the room.
In the randomized trial most cited for it, a facilitated advance care planning conversation with the family present left end-of-life wishes known and respected in 86 percent of patients who died, against 30 percent with usual care. Tools people fill in alone raise how many finish; they have not been shown to raise how well the agent predicts the person. The cards carry the facilitator’s script so two people at one phone get most of the way there. A care coordinator who sits with the client and the agent while they tap is the closest thing to the trial.
Guesses are never stored. CareGoals has no AI in the questions and no speech recognition, and it has not been tested as an intervention of its own: it prepares the person, it does not guarantee the care they want.
Detering et al., The impact of advance care planning on end of life care in elderly patients: randomised controlled trial, BMJ 2010;340:c1345A directive in a drawer is a directive no one reads.
The research is blunt: forms are stored at home or at the lawyer’s office, are often years old, and are not available at the bedside when a decision is made. Two things a client can do the day they sign, with no account and nothing uploaded.
The ComfortCard family file
The summary page puts the Care Wishes into comfortcard.org/family in one tap. The signed state form goes in beside it as a photo, as its own paper. The file lives in that browser on that device: no account, no server copy, nothing for anyone to subpoena from us because we never have it.
The file also keeps a yearly “read it together” date for the Care Wishes, which is the guide’s ongoing-process principle made into a reminder.
The card that says where the original is
Make sure it’s found prints a wallet card: who speaks for me and their phone, where the signed directive and any DNR or POLST are, where the other papers are. It is not itself a medical order; it tells the people in the room where the order is.
It is the piece the guide’s sharing principle needs and the research says is missing: the routine that gets the document out of the drawer.
When to send the client back to the cards: the guide’s six Ds
- Decade: a new decade of age
- Death of a loved one
- Divorce
- Diagnosis of a significant condition
- Decline in function
- Domicile: a move, or someone moves in
The summary page makes a yearly calendar reminder. The six Ds are the other triggers; the guide suggests them as the lawyer’s own prompt to the client. After any change, the summary page says which copies to send again.
A paragraph for the engagement letter or the intake packet
Yours to use and change. Nothing here asks for your name, your firm or your email, and CareGoals keeps no list of who sends it.
Before the signing meeting
Send it with the intake questionnaire, or when the signing is scheduled.
What arrives, and what does not
- The Care Wishes document, printed or as a link: the agent named, how much room they have, treatment and CPR preferences, what the client would not want, comfort and dignity, and any words the client added.
- Nothing arrives at CareGoals. No one here sees what a client taps. There is no API that writes answers, by design.
- The client’s message to their family and anything they marked unfinished stay off the printed packet. Those are theirs.
- No referral, no fee, no list of lawyers. A client finds you the way they always have.
What CareGoals isn’t
A state form, or legal advice
It’s a values document made from the client’s own choices and words. The health care proxy, the directive and their execution are yours to draft and the state’s to recognize. CaringInfo has the form for every state; your clients have you.
A referral network
CareGoals lists no lawyers and no care coordinators, takes nothing from anyone, and sells nothing to the client. There is no account and nothing to buy.
Connected to your file
Nothing flows into your practice software, and no one at CareGoals sees what a client writes. They bring it to you, and you keep your own record.
AI in the questions
The cards run in the client’s browser and record what they tap. No AI writes or changes their answers, and nothing is spoken to a server.
Try it yourself first.
About 20 minutes, on your own device, with the person you would name. It is the fastest way to know what your clients will bring you.
Where this comes from
- Hooper S, Sabatino CP, Sudore RL. Improving Medical-Legal Advance Care Planning. Journal of Pain and Symptom Management 2020;60(2):487–494. The 49–76 percent and 6–7 percent figures are the paper’s summary of two U.S. patient studies it cites; the drawer, the lawyer’s office and the sharing routine are its findings from a 28-member medical-legal panel.
- ABA Commission on Law and Aging, Advance Directives: Counseling Guide for Lawyers (2019), with the American Academy of Hospice and Palliative Medicine and UCSF; the eight principles, the checklist and the six Ds are summarized from Sabatino & Arkfeld, A New Advance Care Planning Counseling Tool for Lawyers, Bifocal, Jan–Feb 2019.
- Detering KM, Hancock AD, Reade MC, Silvester W. The impact of advance care planning on end of life care in elderly patients: randomised controlled trial. BMJ 2010;340:c1345 (wishes known and respected: 86% vs 30%).
- CaringInfo (National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization), advance directive forms by state. Reviewed October 13, 2026.
CareGoals provides advance care planning tools, not medical or legal advice. It isn’t affiliated with the American Bar Association, CaringInfo, or any law firm.