Empathy.com review

[jeankaplansky]

@deansaxe - this is my empathy.com review writeup:

Long story short, I must admit that I forgot my dad had a State of Michigan employee life insurance policy after he passed away on April 6. I went about distributing death certificates, cutting up ID cards and credit cards, and generally getting all the things done, enabling me to leave my dad's house behind and move home to my husband and cats in NYS.

The US Mail reminded me that my dad had a life insurance policy when I returned to New York State on May 20. I filled out the online form, provided the requested information, and eventually discovered that my father's death benefits included a subscription to a new service called empathy.com. A service that offered to help me navigate dealing with various aspects of my father's death, including grief, what to do with his physical belongings, and finally, how to settle his legal estate.

My dad was an attorney. My uncle is an attorney. I've spent time working for attorneys. It didn't occur to me how useful empathy.com could be until I realized that my perspective on things like "the law" and "probate" is shaped significantly by family opinion. Empathy.com provided me with an unbiased opinion on why I needed to file my dad's will in probate, something we had thought we had set up to avoid through the state. I started getting clues that I needed to put something through probate, even if it was just filing the will, when I encountered the first credit card company that refused to close my father's line of credit based on his death certificate alone. My immediate family's legal advice was to write a letter, include a death certificate, and call it a day, except that the credit card account - even at a zero balance - still didn't get closed.

I began to examine empathy.com more closely.

I found a service full of options to help loved ones of the deceased deal with all aspects of putting a loved one's estate - both physical and digital - to rest in addition to the expected grief counselors and social groups.

Caveat: Instead of rewriting known information, I relied on Gemini GenAI to help me come up with a summary of empathy.com's service offerings:

According to Gemini's synopsis, "Empathy.com is a digital platform and service designed to provide comprehensive support to individuals and families navigating the practical and emotional challenges that arise from the loss of a loved one or other significant life transitions."

"The company's core mission is to combine compassionate technology with human guidance to ease the burdens associated with these difficult moments."

Here's a breakdown of what Empathy.com offers:

1. Core Service: Loss Support

Empathy's primary and most prominent service is bereavement support, which involves guiding families through:

"Logistical Tasks: Funeral Planning: Helping to find funeral homes, coordinate logistics, and understand options (burial vs. cremation)."

Note: I didn't use empathy.com's logistical tasks services. Dad didn't want a funeral, and we planned out and funded his funerary preparations well in advance of his death.]

• Estate Settlement: Navigating complex bureaucratic tasks like probate, taxes, closing accounts, managing property, and claiming benefits (e.g., life insurance payouts). They assist with legal paperwork and provide connections to professionals, such as certified public accountants (CPAs), real estate agents, and estate lawyers.

• Financial Matters: Guiding financial tasks, including securing benefits, managing accounts, and understanding potential financial relief."

Note: I was tainted by familial lawyerly bias about probate estates after my dad died. Empathy.com helped me recognize the error of this approach and develop effective plans in real-time through a chat interface. The convenience of getting actionable blew me away: real-time answers, 24 hours a day, seven days a week!

I also didn't use empathy.com to guide me through financial tasks because my dad and I had planned carefully before he passed away, and I had covered Dad's financial affairs by the time I discovered I had a subscription to empathy.com. The exception pertained to the home and car insurance snafu, as well as current car registration laws affecting both New York State and Michigan. Something had to fall through the cracks. Empathy.com made it easier to navigate the stuff that did.]

• Emotional Support: Grief Management: Offering resources, tools, and guidance to help cope with grief, including journaling, guided meditations, audio guides, and access to a community.

• Care Managers: Providing dedicated human support through "Care Managers" who offer personalized guidance, expert advice, and a listening ear.

• Connecting with Professionals: Helping users find qualified grief counselors and therapists.

Note: I did not use the emotional support services offered by empathy.com. My dad and I leaned on each other for emotional support and grief management. I have enough extended family checking on me to make sure I'm not spiraling out of control. I also have a husband who is also an only child who took care of his father in a home hospice setting. The aspect of knowing what to expect was an immense help that allowed my dad and I to settle our grief and emotional support issues in advance of his passing. That said, the combination of technology and honest human communication is where empathy.com excels!

2. How it Works (Combination of Tech and Human Care):

• Digital Companion App: Empathy provides a multi-platform app (available for families, employers, and life insurance companies) that serves as a digital companion. This app offers step-by-step plans, checklists, time-saving tools, and secure digital storage for documents.

• Care Team: Beyond the app, Empathy offers human support through its Care Team, which includes Care Managers who provide personalized guidance via phone, chat, and email.

"Personalized Approach: Users answer a few questions to help Empathy understand their situation, leading to custom "Care Plans" tailored to their unique needs."

Note: The app is carefully planned and incredibly convenient! 24/7 access to the care team is a key benefit for the bereft.

The following information is about empathy.com's target audience, customers, and business model. I didn't think about any of this while using the service. It sat in the background while the platform's features took care of business.

3. Target Audiences & Business Model:
   Empathy primarily operates through partnerships, offering its services as a benefit:

• For Employers: Companies partner with Empathy to provide bereavement support as an employee benefit. The aim is to reduce lost productivity due to grief, improve employee well-being, and demonstrate a compassionate workplace culture. They offer resources for HR professionals and managers on how to support employees who are grieving.

• For Life Insurance Companies: Insurers partner with Empathy to offer comprehensive beneficiary support that goes beyond just a payout. The partnership helps beneficiaries navigate the complex aftermath of a claim, fostering trust and loyalty.

• For Consultants: Empathy also works with consultants who guide their clients toward benefits that drive loyalty and have a lasting impact."

4. Empathy LifeVault™:

In addition to loss support, Empathy also offers LifeVault™, a tool focused on legacy planning, which helps individuals prepare for the future by providing guided tools and secure digital storage to organize key documents and outline essential decisions (like wills, trusts, and other estate planning documents) in one place."

Note: Storage to keep everything about my dad's estate online wasn't a service I needed personally as a tech worker, but the vault makes it easy to find essential documents in one place. I can see other people using the online vault area to keep track of all the paperwork that would otherwise require a conscious organization that grieving people may not attend to with their full attention.

5. Overall Vision:

Empathy's overall vision is to redefine the standard of support for life's most challenging moments, moving towards a more comprehensive system that addresses both the practical logistics and the emotional burdens. They aim to empower people to plan, find clarity, and face life's transitions with greater resilience."

Here's an example of how I used empathy.com to figure out whether I needed to take my dad's estate through a small probate court or if we had covered all the bases in advance of his death:

I started a chat at 11 pm one night about whether or not I needed to open a probate case in court for my dad's estate. I was pleasantly surprised by an immediate answer from a real person at 11 pm. An immediate answer from a human was unexpected. The advice provided was more expected: cover your bases and file the will in probate court. It protects both you - the person who inherited everything from your dad, and your dad's estate from potentially nefarious activities, including identity theft of the dead. I had already considered the possibility of leaving open credit card accounts as an invitation for someone to steal my father's post-life identity. My legal advisors didn't think this would be much of an issue and that it was okay to let the accounts sit at a zero balance. The bank would eventually close the accounts. My family's professional advice didn't sit well with me. I think about the edge cases, and I know that my dad didn't want me to leave loose ends - he was very protective of his privacy and identity in life. Why would he be any different after death?

Further conversation with the actual human on the other end of empathy.com's chat UI convinced me to seek out a probate lawyer as soon as possible. As it turns out, my dad and I missed a few essential details in my best efforts to prevent the estate from going to probate. I found a lawyer and opened a small, unsupervised probate estate so I could 1) establish some separation between my dad's estate and mine financially and 2) handle some interstate details that would be difficult to manage without the letters of authority provided by going through probate.

I didn't necessarily need the grief advice or counseling offered by empathy.com. Still, I needed probate law counseling: neither my dad nor the other attorneys in my family directly handled probate law. Empathy.com helped me realize that I wasn't getting unbiased legal advice from my family.

As an only child, already biased about lawyers and probate law, empathy.com kept me from acting as my own worst enemy when it came to filing my dad's will in probate court. Yes. I had to spend the money to file the claim. In return, I will receive the proper papers of authority enabling me to finalize the closure of his zero-balance credit cards and any other accounts (such as Sam's Club) that require additional documentation beyond a death certificate.

What a pleasant surprise! An unbiased service that helped me navigate one of the more complex parts of a loved one's death and estate closure. I had no problems handling my dad's digital identity since I was the person managing his various accounts going back ten years. It was easy for me to close down social media accounts and unsubscribe to magazines and newspapers. I was already listed as a co-owner on all of the bank accounts. I even got the car transferred into my name through the DMV by showing up with the title and a death certificate. And that's where I ran into SNAFU number two: insurance.

Dad forgot to add me to the insurance policies on the house and car. Had he added me before his death, I would not have had to go through some extra costly steps to straighten things out on the insurance front. Once again, I took advice from empathy.com about the best course of action. Adding me to insurance policies (or removing my mother from the same insurance policies despite her death in 2018) didn't occur to my dad or me as he got closer and closer to passing. I'm reasonably sure that Dad thought I could keep up the payments on the insurance policies, and all would be well. That was before I moved his car to New York State, where I officially own a house and reside. New York State's laws require that you register a vehicle owned by a New York resident within thirty days of moving the vehicle to New York.

Furthermore, Dad's Michigan-based insurance company was unable to write a policy for a car registered in New York legally. Empathy.com advised me that the simplest solution to the problem was to obtain New York State driver's insurance, inspect the car, and re-register it with the New York Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV). Empathy.com was right on point. Obtaining NYS car insurance and registering the car at the NYS DMV was the easiest and most expedient solution to the issue, even though I own my dad's house in Michigan. I live in NY. Therefore, the car must be insured and registered in my name at my primary address.

The homeowner's insurance became another point of contention. Again, empathy.com provided me with sound advice: cancel the old policy and obtain a new one from a reputable insurance company. The previous insurance company issued a refund, and I was able to apply it to the new policy.

My bottom-line assessment of my empathy.com experience: My situation is not normal. I'm related to far too many opinionated lawyers and know friends of the family who all want to advise me as my father's only child.

Empathy.com provides an unbiased source of accurate and actionable information. Further, the service didn't make me wait for answers to my most pressing questions. I didn't expect to have a service like this behind me as I navigated my new world reality with my dad. My family and friends had the social side of things taken care of. Empathy.com provided me with the backup to make sure I was doing the right things at the right time.

Finally, Empathy.com continues to send me push notifications and email messages to check in with me, ensuring that I'm getting the support I need from the service.

References from Gemini's Synopsis

• Probate and Estate Administration – LeBlanc Diggins. https://www.leblancdiggins.com/probate-and-estate-adminstration/

• Why Clear Financial Reporting Is Essential for Business Success. https://cambooth.com/why-clear-financial-reporting-is-essential-for-business-success/

[deansaxe]

Thank you @jeankaplansky. As we think about merging this into the DADE repo - and I'm not clear where this lives yet - how much of the personal statements in here do you want to include? Would you prefer that we keep this as a personal narrative or do you want to pseudonomize the writing a bit?

[jeankaplansky]

Let me re-read and get back to you about pseudonymizing. I don’t think I said anything that shouldn’t be out there, but a second glance over is a good idea. I’m tied up in more estate stuff this week and next. I’ll have an answer for you by the next meeting. All the best, Jean Kaplansky, Cross-Industry Senior Content Production Technologies Professional  M: +1.518.930.1068 ***@***.*** https://linkedin/in/jeankaplansky

…

On Jun 30, 2025 at 2:11 PM -0400, Dean H. Saxe ***@***.***>, wrote: deansaxe left a comment (openid/death-and-the-digital-estate#40) Thank you @jeankaplansky. As we think about merging this into the DADE repo - and I'm not clear where this lives yet - how much of the personal statements in here do you want to include? Would you prefer that we keep this as a personal narrative or do you want to pseudonomize the writing a bit? — Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub, or unsubscribe. You are receiving this because you were mentioned.Message ID: ***@***.***>

[jeankaplansky]

@deansaxe - Follow-up: I'm comfortable with the information I've provided. People need to know about edge cases and lived experience. I don't feel the need to anonymize any of the above.

I think it's important for people to understand that families have shared opinions and biases that may not always lead to the best approach or correct outcome. I think my experience of stuff we missed is more important than what we got right.

-JK