Probate and estate services
Twelve practice areas, one discipline: estates administered on documentation, valuation and judgement. Each page below sets out the law, the practical issues and the questions most often asked at first consultation.
When a person dies leaving assets in Ireland, someone must acquire the legal authority to collect those assets, pay the debts and distribute what remains. That authority is a grant of rep...
Most attention in probate falls on obtaining the grant, but the grant is simply the key. Administration, everything that happens after it, is where the personal representative's real expo...
When a person dies without a valid will, the Succession Act 1965 writes one for them. The statutory rules of intestacy determine both who inherits and in what shares, and who is entitled ...
The farm estate is the signature case of South-East probate practice, and the hardest kind of ordinary estate there is. The asset is large, illiquid and beloved; the will, where there is ...
Most wills are proved without question. The minority that are challenged tend to share a profile: an elderly testator, a late change of will, a principal beneficiary who was close to the ...
Section 117 of the Succession Act 1965 allows a child of a testator to apply to court on the ground that the parent failed in their moral duty to make proper provision for the child in ac...
Irish law does not permit a testator to disinherit a spouse. Whatever the will says, a surviving spouse or civil partner has a legal right share fixed by the Succession Act 1965: one half...
The personal representative holds all the levers of an estate, the assets, the information, the timetable, and beneficiaries hold almost none. When that asymmetry is abused, or simply neg...
Emigration built the South-East's families, and it built its estates: land in Kilkenny owned by a testator who died in London, an Irish bank account in a Boston estate, beneficiaries scat...
Many estates do not end with distribution; they continue as trusts. A will may leave shares for minor children to be held until age, establish a discretionary trust for a vulnerable son o...
Every difficult estate this practice administers is an argument for a better will. The contested probate work described across this site, section 117 claims, sibling litigation over farms...
Two kinds of estate frighten personal representatives more than any others: the estate whose beneficiaries cannot be found, and the estate whose debts exceed its assets. Both are governed...