The High Court has refused to allow a man to remortgage his deceased mother’s house after her three other children disputed the validity of a purported will and where there was reason to believe that she had been subjected to undue influence. Rebecca Armstrong Associate Solicitor reports on this recent case. The property was a five-bedroom house in south London in which the mother had lived since her divorce in…

The High Court has provided some useful guidelines on what is required for a person’s statements to be legally classed as ‘deathbed gifts’ in inheritance cases. David Tew, Associate Solicitor provides an update The court was asked to determine the proper distribution of the estate of a married couple. The wife died in January 2019 of cancer and the husband died of a heart attack shortly after in May 2019.…

Two teenage brothers have been granted a share of their father’s estate even though they were estranged from him and had been excluded from his will. Rebecca Armstrong Associate Solicitor reports on this recent case. The two boys, referred to only as J and H in court, who were aged 16 and 15 respectively at the date of their father’s death in 2018. Their parents had divorced in 2012. The mother…

The simple answer: Potentially. Rebecca Armstrong explains below … It is often assumed that an individual with Dementia can’t make a valid will and it is therefore one of the most common grounds for challenging the validity of a will. That is not right though. The mere existence of such a diagnosis does not mean that the person lacked the necessary mental capacity. The issue with dementia is that a…

A court has corrected an error in a man’s will to reinstate his original intention as to how his estate should be divided among family members. Rebecca Armstrong reports on this recent case. The issue arose because the deceased had made a will in 1998 dividing his estate into 52 parts to be given to different named beneficiaries from his wife’s family. A codicil executed in 2005 deleted two individuals…