Frequently asked questions

Yes. Where a will is prepared online but signed and witnessed correctly, it is exactly as valid as one signed across a desk. The law does not care where the document was drafted. It cares how it was executed.

The rules come from the Wills Act 1837. The will must be in writing. You must sign it, or somebody must sign it for you in your presence and at your direction. Two witnesses must be present at the same time when you sign, and each of them must then sign in front of you. A witness must not be a beneficiary or the husband, wife or civil partner of a beneficiary, because that cancels their gift.

What is not the same is who prepared it. Anybody can sell you a will online. We are a firm of solicitors regulated by the Solicitors Regulation Authority, we carry compulsory professional indemnity insurance, and we are answerable to the Legal Ombudsman. A solicitor also checks that you have the capacity to make the will and records the meeting, which is what defends the will if it is ever challenged.

We will tell you exactly how to sign and witness yours. That single step is where most homemade wills fail.

As soon as somebody else would be worse off if you died without one. That is usually a long time before people think.

Make one when you buy a home, when you have a child, when you marry or enter a civil partnership, when you separate, when you start living with a partner you are not married to, and when you take on a business. Each of those changes who would inherit and who would be left sorting it out.

Two situations are urgent rather than sensible. If you have children under 18, your will is the only reliable way to say who should bring them up. And if you live with a partner you are not married to, they inherit nothing at all under the intestacy rules, however long you have been together and whoever is named on the deeds.

Very often the reason somebody finally makes a will is that there has been a death in the family. If that is what has brought you here, it is a good reason and you are not late.

You die intestate, and a fixed set of rules decides who gets what. They are the same for everybody and they take no account of what you would have wanted.

If you are married or in a civil partnership and have children, your husband, wife or civil partner takes your personal possessions, the first £322,000, and half of what is left. Your children share the other half and take it at 18. If you are married with no children, your husband, wife or civil partner takes everything.

If you are not married and not in a civil partnership, your estate goes to your children, then your parents, then your brothers and sisters, then further out through the family. If nobody qualifies, it goes to the Crown.

Two things do most of the damage. An unmarried partner inherits nothing, and may have to bring a court claim to get anything at all. And nobody is appointed to deal with the estate, so somebody has to apply to be the administrator, which is slower than acting as an executor and can start an argument before anything has even been valued.

Read it through every three to five years, and look at it properly whenever your life changes.

Two events change a will without you lifting a finger. Getting married or entering a civil partnership revokes your existing will completely, unless it was made in express contemplation of that marriage. If you marry and do not make a new will, you die intestate. Divorce does not revoke the will, but your former husband or wife is treated as having died before you, so any gift to them fails and their appointment as executor falls away.

Beyond that, look at it when a child is born, when a beneficiary or executor dies, when you buy or sell property, when you separate, when your children are old enough that a trust is no longer needed, and when what you own changes enough to matter for inheritance tax.

Never amend a will by crossing something out or writing in the margin. An alteration made after signing has no effect unless it is signed and witnessed itself, and it throws doubt over the whole document. Small changes can be made by codicil, but unless the change is very minor a fresh will is cleaner and costs little more.

Yes. Ask us about storage on your consultation call and we will explain how it works and what, if anything, it costs, before you decide.

It matters more than people expect. The original signed document is the will. A copy is not. If the original cannot be found after a death, the law starts from the assumption that you destroyed it deliberately, and your executors have to argue their way past that with evidence.

Wherever the original ends up, tell your executors where it is. Do not put it in a bank safe deposit box that cannot be opened without a grant of probate, because the grant is the very thing they need the will to apply for. And keep a single sheet somewhere your family will look, saying where the will is, who your solicitor is, which bank you use and where the pension is. It will save your executors weeks.

Yes. Wills start from a fixed fee of £150 + VAT for a single will and from £275 + VAT for a matching pair for a couple. Our fee for a lasting power of attorney is a fixed fee, confirmed on your consultation call before any work starts.

You are told the fee before any work starts, not after. If something about your circumstances means the work falls outside the fixed fee, we will tell you at the point you instruct us and agree the position with you then. We do not send surprise bills.

The fee covers the consultation call with a named member of the team, the will drafted for your circumstances, one round of amendments, and clear instructions on how to sign and witness it.