New Republic Partners Brings Complex Estate Plans to Life With Luminary

New Republic Partners is a multi-family office headquartered in Charlotte, North Carolina, with additional offices across the Southeast and in Denver, Colorado. The firm serves high-net-worth families with integrated investment management, legacy planning, and family office services designed to support multigenerational wealth, governance, and long-term family objectives.

For New Republic Partners, trust and estate planning is a central component of the family office services it provides to families. The firm supports families with complex structures that often include multiple entities, multigenerational beneficiaries, philanthropic goals, and planning decisions that unfold over time. As the firm expanded, including the addition of a wealth strategist, leadership recognized an opportunity to modernize the estate planning process by deepening engagement across generations while also enhancing internal efficiency and coordination with external advisors.

Like many firms in the industry, New Republic Partners historically relied on tools such as Excel and PowerPoint to translate estate documents into client-facing materials. While effective, those tools required significant manual effort and produced static outputs that were difficult to update as asset values and planning assumptions changed. “We were spending a considerable amount of time creating materials,” said Managing Partner Zelle Dunn. “And once they were built, it was challenging and very time consuming to keep them updated as information changed.”

Why Luminary Stood Out

As New Republic Partners evaluated technology, Luminary stood out for its ability to handle complex estates while remaining intuitive for families.

That combination mattered. New Republic Partners needed a platform that could support sophisticated trust and entity structures while also making those structures easier for clients, especially across generations, to understand. Luminary offered a more dynamic way to bring estate plans to life, helping advisors move beyond static deliverables and into more interactive planning conversations.

1. Sophisticated Modeling

One of the most impactful capabilities for the team has been Luminary’s modeling tools.

“One of the things I’ve loved about Luminary are the calculators,” said Wealth Strategist Jack Lowe. “Being able to model a strategy and show clients in real time — if we change a growth rate or adjust an assumption — how does that strategy play out over time?”

Rather than describing potential outcomes abstractly, advisors can quantify the impact of different decisions in real time. That shift has helped turn estate planning conversations into more practical, collaborative decision-making sessions.

2. Time Savings

Luminary’s AI-powered document tools have also created meaningful efficiency gains. Instead of re-reading hundreds of pages before each review, advisors can spend more time evaluating strategy and preparing recommendations. Luminary AI provides custom document summaries across 20+ estate document types, with clickable citations for every extracted data point. Users can also open a chat box to get answers to document-related questions in seconds.

“The document summaries have been a lifesaver,” Lowe said. “It gives us a high-level overview that we can quickly revisit ahead of client meetings. Being able to read a trust and instantly generate a summary has saved us hours per client.”

3. Built-In Collaboration

Just as important, Luminary helped New Republic Partners strengthen collaboration with estate attorneys rather than replace it.

“We’re by no means trying to replace estate counsel,” emphasized Zelle Dunn, New Republic’s Managing Partner. “Attorneys are essential to the process. What Luminary helps us do is strengthen that partnership by ensuring everyone is working from the same information and that families come to those conversations better prepared.”

Luminary’s collaboration features allow New Republic Partners to share centralized visuals and summaries with attorneys, ensure all advisors are reviewing the same balance sheet and entity structure, surface potential updates proactively, and prepare families more effectively before meetings with drafting counsel.

“It’s a fantastic, centralized resource for us to both review the same set of facts,” Lowe said. “When everyone is working off the same correct information, it leads to better conversations and outcomes.”

The platform also integrates with portfolio reporting tools such as eMoney and Black Diamond, helping keep asset values current without requiring manual updates.

The Impact: More Engaged Families, Better Planning Conversations

Creating clarity for families and a springboard for next-generation conversations

New Republic Partners has seen firsthand how visualization can change the tone and depth of estate planning conversations.

In one example, a family that had recently sold a business and experienced a significant liquidity event reviewed their estate through Luminary’s diagrams, including the breakdown at the beneficiary level.

“They were shocked to see the amount of their family’s total net worth displayed on a single page. They were even more surprised to see their children’s net worth - seeing the benefits of their estate planning.,’” Lowe recalled.

Seeing the numbers mapped clearly across entities and beneficiaries made the magnitude of the plan tangible in a new way. That clarity quickly led to deeper conversations about governance, education, and next-generation engagement.

“Involving children is one of the top priorities for our families,” Lowe said. “And Luminary has helped us create a springboard into those conversations.”

For New Republic Partners, this has helped deepen relationships beyond investment management and reinforced the firm’s role as a long-term partner in stewardship, family alignment, and legacy planning.

Saving time and shifting it toward higher-value advice

One of the most meaningful changes for New Republic Partners has been how much time the team has reclaimed. In the past, building a clear view of a family’s estate structure required hours of document review, manual summaries, and recreating diagrams in PowerPoint. Even small updates often meant revisiting the entire presentation.

Today, much of that foundational work happens inside Luminary.

“The biggest shift,” Lowe explained, “is getting to the current state much faster. Once that’s built, we can spend our time thinking about where the family wants to go next.”

What once took five or six hours of preparation can now be streamlined significantly. Estate reviews that previously consumed an entire meeting can often be clarified in 20 to 30 minutes, leaving more time for strategy, alignment, and decision-making.

Rather than rebuilding materials by hand, advisors are modeling charitable strategies, evaluating liquidity placement, and testing different assumptions in real time. The result is not just greater efficiency, but more proactive and strategic planning conversations.

A differentiator in prospective client conversations

Luminary has also become a meaningful differentiator in prospective client meetings. New Republic Partners uses sample reports, educational materials, and scenario modeling tools to demonstrate how the firm approaches estate planning even before onboarding a new relationship.

“We regularly incorporate Luminary into discussions with prospective clients,” Lowe said. “It allows up to explain how we can intake their documents, visualize complex structures clearly, and help them think through potential planning changes. “

In charitable planning discussions, for example, advisors can model different gifting amounts using round numbers without building a full client profile, giving prospects a clear preview of the firm’s capabilities and planning approach.

“It reinforces our commitment to doing this work thoughtfully,” Dunn added. “It’s a meaningful differentiator for our firm.”

Strengthening internal planning discussions

While Luminary was initially adopted to enhance the client-facing experience, it has also become a valuable internal planning tool. By clearly visualizing liquidity, ownership structures, and asset location across trusts and estate entities, advisors can more easily evaluate where investments should reside and how those decisions affect broader planning outcomes.

“It’s not just estate planning — it’s entity planning,” Lowe explained.

This visibility allows the team to bring estate, entity, and investment considerations into the same conversation, strengthening internal collaboration and supporting more informed decision-making.

From Static Deliverables to a More Dynamic Planning Standard

As New Republic Partners continues to grow, Luminary remains essential in both internal and family-facing estate planning conversations. The platform supports more proactive reviews, stronger collaboration with attorneys and CPAs, deeper engagement with next-generation family members, and a more modern planning experience aligned with client expectations.

For Dunn, the greatest benefit is the way it encourages meaningful family engagement.

“It helps families engage in conversations they might otherwise avoid,” she said. “Being able to model different scenarios before drafting documents or making changes adds tremendous value to the planning process.”

The Bottom Line

For New Republic Partners, Luminary has helped transform estate planning from a static exercise into a more dynamic, ongoing experience.

The firm can now take something that is often highly complex and make it more understandable and actionable for families. Advisors spend less time recreating materials and more time modeling decisions, aligning stakeholders, and guiding strategy.

By pairing high-touch advisory relationships with modern planning technology, New Republic Partners has strengthened its ability to serve as a trusted, multigenerational partner — delivering greater clarity for families today and greater confidence in the plans that will shape their legacy tomorrow. Request a demo to learn more.