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Home Finance How to navigate probate without extensive legal costs and minimum delay

How to navigate probate without extensive legal costs and minimum delay

by Jessica Weisman-Pitts
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iStock 1265565604

How to navigate probate without extensive legal costs and minimum delay

Mike Davis, founder and Managing Director of My Probate Partner

Probate, or ‘estate administration’, refers to the entire process of dealing with someone’s legal, financial and tax affairs after they die.

Probate is not always mandatory and is only necessary to deal with an asset if an organisation/body – such as a bank – requires it before they will let you deal with an account or asset. If there is a property, then probate may also be needed to change the name on the title deeds.

Probate can be an overwhelming and frustrating process to do on your own, but it can also be costly and take a very long time if you hand it over to a solicitor. For this reason, a happy medium exists in the form of independent probate support services that offer a middle-ground solution to doing probate on your own and hiring a lawyer to do it for you.

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When do you need probate?

When someone dies, it is essential to deal with their ‘estate’. This is made up of anything they owned on the day they died, including their home, belongings, savings and investments.

In around half of all deaths, you will need to obtain a legal document to be able to deal with the assets. This is officially called a ‘Grant of Confirmation’ in Scotland, but often referred to simply as ‘probate’ (this is what it’s called in the rest of the English speaking world).

Regardless of whether there is a Will or not, if you need probate in Scotland, and the estate is worth less than £36,000, then the local Sheriff Court will help you to obtain a Grant of Confirmation, free of charge. If the estate is worth more than this, the Sheriff Court is not permitted to help.

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What makes it difficult?

In Scotland, the Confirmation process is very poorly constructed, with unclear guidance and missing or vague information. This means that, although you may feel like you have followed all the necessary steps, it is almost certain that your application will be rejected with no explanation why.

Trying to do the probate process completely on your own can be very daunting, even more so because the Sheriff Court process is not set up to help you succeed. Different

Sheriff Courts have different standards, resulting in rejection rates of over 95% for personal applications in most places.

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Those who try to do probate themselves often become overwhelmed and give up when they run into unexpected challenges or suffer repeated rejections from the court with no explanation whatsoever.

Do you need to use a lawyer?

In most cases, you can do probate yourself. However, if there is no Will in place, and the estate is worth more than £250,000 – except when there is a surviving spouse that inherits the entire estate – you will need to enlist a lawyer to handle the process. (Check who inherits when there is no Will.)

Other circumstances where it may be beneficial to seek legal advice include:

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  • If there are complicated or fractured family relationships
  • If the estate is overly complex and there is Inheritance Tax to pay
  • If someone is challenging the validity of the Will
  • Where there are unusual or complicated tax arrangements, such as assets in trusts
  • If the estate is bankrupt (owes more in debt than it has in assets)
  • Where there are foreign assets in the estate (you may need a lawyer in that country)

However, using a lawyer for the probate process can be costly and take a very long time. Usually, you’ll have to pay an hourly rate – which could be as high as £300 per hour (plus VAT). Furthermore, it’s not uncommon for a lawyer to take longer than 6-12 months to finalise matters, and for it to cost several thousand pounds – sometimes as high as 3% or 4% of the estate value.

A cost-effective alternative

For a long time, the only way to do probate was to use a lawyer, however, opting for this route can come with many disadvantages. The majority of lawyers charge high fees for their services – many of which don’t actually require legal expertise – such as filling in forms and liaising with third parties; communication with you as their client is often not a priority. Furthermore, multiple delays can be incurred due to a lack of efficiency caused by the large caseloads they carry and a general dislike of using technology.

This is where probate support services come in. They exist to provide an alternative, cost-effective way to do probate that allows you to stay in control of the process, without needing to spend ages learning about how it works through trial and error. Not only does this allow you to decide on the pace you want to move at, but you can save thousands of

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pounds in the process by avoiding having to use a lawyer and speeding things up considerably.

The benefits of a probate support service

Dedicated probate support services work for relatively straightforward situations (which make up around 90% of cases) and are designed to help you navigate all the challenges and pitfalls of going through the probate process in Scotland.

They provide very similar value to a lawyer in terms of knowledge and experience, but for a fraction of the cost. They have the ability to help you get your Grant of Confirmation approved the first time and support you in dealing with all the other aspects of closing down someone’s financial and legal affairs.

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Using a dedicated probate support service to deal with the estate will result in:

  • A faster route to probate and completion (often by months)
  • People keeping more of their inheritance (usually by thousands of pounds)
  • Less stress and frustration by using a service specifically designed to help with the complexities of the process

To conclude, hiring a lawyer to do probate can mean spending thousands of pounds on an often straightforward situation. Of course, some circumstances will be more complicated than others, and a lawyer may be the only option, however, this is an unnecessary expense in the majority of cases.

Designed to provide an affordable, quick solution to deal with simple cases, probate support companies offer you the best of both worlds. Through combining expert advice and empowering you to keep control of the process first-hand, this dedicated service allows you to do probate yourself with less stress and time investment – all for a fraction of the cost of using a lawyer.

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