Wills and probate practice sits at the heart of private client law, combining technical tax planning expertise with deeply personal client relationships. The work ranges from a straightforward mirror will for a married couple to a complex non-dom estate with offshore trusts, agricultural property, and business relief claims. What these matters share is the need for precision — errors in will drafting have long tails, and errors in estate administration have immediate financial consequences for beneficiaries.

Running a wills and probate practice well requires efficient systems for a recurring-but-variable workflow, careful management of client money held in estate accounts, and a compliance framework that satisfies both the SRA and HMRC. This guide covers the operational essentials.

The Private Client Caseload

Wills and Estate Planning

Will drafting is, on its face, a standardised service — but the complexity range is enormous. A basic will for a client with a straightforward estate (residential property, bank accounts, no minor children, no IHT exposure) can be produced from a template in under an hour. A will for a client with a blended family, business interests, a property in France, and a pension that needs careful nomination advice is a project requiring multiple attendances and specialist input.

The challenge for practice management is that both arrive through the same front door and are initially described by the client in nearly identical terms (“I just need a will”). A robust initial questionnaire — covering asset types, family structure, previous wills, capacity considerations, and any international elements — is essential both for scoping the work and for generating the evidence of due diligence that protects the firm if the will is later challenged.

Probate claims and will challenges under the Inheritance (Provision for Family and Dependants) Act 1975 are increasingly common. The Law Commission’s most recent statistics show a continued increase in contentious probate litigation. This means that the evidential record around a will — the file notes recording the client’s instructions, any capacity assessment, the discussion of potential claims by excluded beneficiaries — has value not just as professional good practice but as litigation-ready documentation.

Estate Administration

Estate administration after a death is often where the firm’s relationship with a client family consolidates for a generation. Done well, it is also genuinely profitable — Probate Registry data shows that grant applications average around £25,000 of estate value at the lower end and run into millions for larger estates. Estate administration fees as a percentage of estate value are transparent and widely accepted by clients.

The workflow for estate administration falls into broadly sequential phases: gathering initial instructions and details of assets and liabilities, completing the inheritance tax return (IHT400 or IHT205/IHT207 where available), applying for the grant of probate or letters of administration, collecting in assets, paying liabilities and legacies, and preparing estate accounts.

Each phase has its own dependencies and potential delays — HMRC processing of IHT forms, HMCTS processing the probate application, financial institutions releasing assets — that are outside the solicitor’s control. Managing client expectations around these delays, and maintaining regular proactive communication even when there is nothing new to report, is one of the most important client relationship skills in estate administration.

Inheritance Tax and Estate Planning

IHT Exposure: The Current Landscape

The nil-rate band has been frozen at £325,000 since 2009, and the residence nil-rate band (available where a home passes to direct descendants) adds a further £175,000 for eligible estates. With house price inflation, an increasing proportion of estates that clients consider “not large enough to worry about” are in fact above the threshold, particularly in London and the South East.

The 2024 Autumn Budget introduced further changes to agricultural property relief and business relief that took effect from April 2026, and the inclusion of unused pension funds in estates from April 2027. These changes significantly alter the IHT position of clients with farming businesses, trading company shareholdings, and defined contribution pension pots. Every will review appointment for the foreseeable future needs to include an updated IHT exposure assessment.

Reliefs and Exemptions

Business Property Relief (BPR) and Agricultural Property Relief (APR) remain valuable, though their scope is being curtailed. The spouse exemption remains unlimited for UK-domiciled spouses. Charitable legacies of at least 10% of the net estate attract a reduced IHT rate of 36% rather than 40%. Lifetime gifting — particularly use of the annual exemption, gifts from normal expenditure out of income, and potentially exempt transfers — remains the most accessible IHT mitigation tool.

Practitioners advising on IHT need to maintain current knowledge of both the statute (the Inheritance Tax Act 1984) and HMRC practice. HMRC’s IHT manual is publicly available and is the primary reference for HMRC’s approach to specific asset classes.

The Probate Application Process

HMCTS Probate Portal

The HMCTS online probate portal is now the standard route for most grant applications by professionals. The portal allows online submission of PA1P (with a will) or PA1A (without a will) applications, payment of the probate fee (calculated on net estate value), and tracking of the application status.

The portal has improved considerably since its initial rollout, though delays remain an issue — HMCTS probate registry processing times have been volatile, sometimes exceeding 16 weeks for straightforward applications. Planning timelines accordingly, and advising clients of realistic expectations, is important.

For complex estates — those with offshore assets, multiple jurisdictions, foreign grants requiring re-sealing, or unusual asset structures — the portal application may not be the appropriate route, and paper applications with supporting evidence remain available.

Dealing with Third Parties

Estate administration involves extensive correspondence with financial institutions, HMRC, HMCTS, and beneficiaries. Each financial institution has its own process for releasing assets — some require sealed grants, some accept office copies, some have their own forms. Maintaining a matrix of the requirements for the institutions you most commonly encounter saves the fee earner time on every repeat matter.

HMRC correspondence around IHT — conditional exemption, deferred payment applications, IHT reference numbers, clearance certificates — requires careful diarising. The IHT reference must be obtained before the probate application; clearance should be sought once all assets have been gathered and the final estate position is known.

Client Money Management in Estate Administration

The SRA Accounts Rules

Estate administration involves holding and distributing substantial sums of client money. The SRA Accounts Rules (SRA AR) impose strict requirements: client money must be held in a designated client account; interest must be accounted for in accordance with the firm’s written interest policy; bills must be rendered for all work before a client account transfer is made; client accounts must not go into debit.

The risks in estate administration are heightened by the amounts involved and by the fact that the “client” in estate administration is not a single person but a collection of personal representatives and beneficiaries, whose interests may diverge. When conflict arises between PRs, or between PRs and residuary beneficiaries, the solicitor’s position as holder of estate funds becomes acutely sensitive. Having a clear policy on what steps to take when beneficiary disputes arise — including when to apply to the court for directions — is essential.

Executor and Beneficiary Communication

Estates with multiple executors or large numbers of beneficiaries generate significant communication overhead. Every beneficiary is entitled to receive the estate accounts; legacy beneficiaries need to be notified and paid; residuary beneficiaries need regular updates on progress.

Building a communication schedule into the matter management workflow — regular updates at defined intervals regardless of whether there is new information, and immediate notification of material events such as the issue of the grant or the sale of property — reduces ad hoc contact and demonstrates the standard of service that justifies the firm’s fees.

Technology for Wills and Probate Practices

Will Drafting Tools

Document automation for will drafting is well established. Tools that take structured input from a questionnaire and generate a draft will — correctly executed, with appropriate trusts, powers of attorney recitals, and digital asset clauses — reduce drafting time and eliminate the formatting and consistency errors that manual drafting produces.

Any will drafting tool must be reviewed regularly against current legislation and STEP precedents. The STEP Standard Provisions (currently 3rd edition) are widely incorporated by reference in wills and trusts; ensuring that the tool’s output is consistent with these provisions and with the STEP Digital Assets Special Provisions (2nd edition) is the supervising solicitor’s responsibility.

IHT Calculation Software

IHT calculation tools that automate the preparation of IHT400 schedules, calculate the tax due, and generate the narrative for HMRC are now standard in well-run private client practices. The calculation is not conceptually difficult, but it is detailed, and errors in the IHT400 can trigger HMRC enquiries or penalties.

AML in Wills and Probate

AML obligations apply fully in wills and probate work. The Law Society’s AML guidance for private client work requires identity verification of the testator (and consideration of capacity and undue influence), identification of executors and beneficiaries in estate administration, and consideration of the source of estate funds where large values are involved.

Digital ID verification tools are particularly useful in private client work, where many clients are elderly, geographically dispersed (including overseas beneficiaries), or mobility-limited. A verification process that can be completed on a smartphone or tablet, with liveness checks and document scanning, is both more accessible and more resilient to forgery than traditional paper-based ID.

Building a Sustainable Private Client Practice

The Review Appointment Model

The most commercially sustainable model for wills and probate practices is the regular review cycle. A will drafted in 2010 for a client with a young family and a starter home may be wholly inappropriate for that same client in 2024, with adult children, significant pension assets, a second marriage, and a property worth four times the original purchase price.

Annual or biennial review appointments — either in person or by video call — are both a compliance obligation (the duty to keep clients advised of material changes in the law that affect their planning) and a commercial opportunity. A review that identifies an outdated will, a missing LPA, or an IHT problem will generate instruction. The client who gets this call proactively is a loyal referrer; the client whose estate is administrated by the next generation after a death that revealed outdated planning is a source of complaints.

Obiter helps private client teams manage the correspondence-heavy workflow that estate administration generates — reading and triaging incoming correspondence from HMRC, HMCTS, and financial institutions, drafting update letters to executors and beneficiaries, recording billable time from calls and attendances, and maintaining AML records. For practices running large numbers of concurrent estate administrations, having the AI handle the communication layer means fee earners spend their time on the analysis and advice that genuinely requires a qualified solicitor.

Wills and Probate Practice Management: A Digital Approach