Drafting a Will and specialising in estate planning are not the same thing

Some years ago the Legal Ombudsman reported on the state of complaints around lawyer-drafted Wills - complaints galore, despite Will-writing generally sitting outside the Ombudsman's remit, precisely because Will-writing is not a regulated activity. The finding surprises people: surely a lawyer-drafted Will is a safe Will?

The real gap: generalist v specialist

Drafting a Will and specialising in estate planning are not the same thing. A competently drafted document can still fail the family, because the failure usually is not in the drafting - it is in what was never checked. How the property is actually owned at the Land Registry. Whether an old trust already controls an asset. Whether "my children" captures the family as it really is. These are the checks a specialist runs as standard and a general drafter - whatever their profession - often does not.

What we see in reviews

Our Will-review work bears this out constantly. Wills that read perfectly well on paper, defeated by an ownership structure nobody examined; careful trust provisions that could never operate because the asset was never theirs to give. In our Academy training we group Will failure into four categories - life changes, insufficient planning, poor drafting and capacity issues - and only one of the four is about the document itself. Of the Wills we review, only around 1 in 7 need no action at all.

What to look for

The professional standard in estate planning is STEP - the Society of Trust and Estate Practitioners. Fewer than 1 in 5 UK Will-writers hold a professional-standard qualification. Whoever you use, ask two questions: what estate planning qualification do you hold, and what do you check beyond the document itself?

Key takeaways

• A Will can be competently drafted and still fail - the danger is in what was never checked
• Specialist scrutiny (ownership, existing trusts, family structure) is the difference
• If your Will was not written by a specialist, a review is the fastest way to find out what it actually does

Our STEP-qualified estate planners review existing Wills, whoever wrote them. Ask your adviser, or contact us directly.