Estate, trust and will disputes

How we can help

We act for all sorts of clients in this area, either as claimant or defendant. That includes individual beneficiaries, trustees, executors, administrators and charities.

Some of the services we offer include:

• dealing with disagreements over distributing assets in an estate, or managing a trust
• removing executors or removing trustees
• substituting executors or substituting trustees
• challenging a will, for example because the testator lacked capacity to make decisions, if another beneficiary put undue pressure on them or for want of knowledge and approval by the testator
• challenging the distribution of an estate using the Inheritance (Provision for Family and Dependants) Act 1975 (often called a 1975 Act claim)
• contentious matters involving the Court of Protection
• dealing with mismanaged trusts, for example a trustee making inappropriate investments
• helping with disputes over bequests or gifts left to charity in a will

In these types of disputes, sometimes it’s impossible to avoid going to court. But we’ll always try to fix things as quickly and cost-effectively as we can.

Our lawyers

Our team are experts in this complicated field. Most are members of the industry’s top professional body too (ACTAPS – the Association of Contentious Trust & Probate Specialists).

Our experience

Here are just some examples of our recent work in this area:

• we were part of Burns v Burns, a significant Court of Appeal case that considered the capacity, knowledge and approval of an elderly testator
• we recovered a large sum of money for a widow who was left very little by her late husband
• we advised in Kennedy v Kennedy, a landmark case applying new law on equitable mistake
• we protected a major musical education charity’s position as beneficiary in a substantial Inheritance Act claim
• we helped the executors of an extremely valuable estate interpret a handwritten home-made will
• we helped a Cambridge college in a dispute with the deceased’s partner over a multi-jurisdictional £3m estate