Discover how the legal industry will milk your estate when your gone and how they set you up before you go.
The set-up
Most lawyers will write a will for a few hundred dollars. This will be a document full of flowery 19th century words that make you feel like you must be getting something really special for you money.
What you are really getting
Lawyers know that almost all executors will use the lawyer that wrote the will to assist them to administer the estate (some even write it into the will). So their small investment of doing a will for a few hundred dollars is about to pay off big time. Depending on how competent the executor is they can run up charges of tens of thousands of dollars. In addition they have the opportunity to cover up any mistakes they made in the will and blame it on you (the dead and cant argue). Actually, the worse they make the will and the better a chance of a dispute and MORE fees.
Now what about this document you have signed? If you were buying a fridge, you have consumer protection demanding that you can understand the contract, so it must be in plain english. But your will, that says how you want your estate distributed is so full of gobbledygook that you have no idea what you are signing.
Family Provision Claims
"The legislation is a boon for practitioners as it greatly increases the number of persons who can make a claim"January 1998 "The Law Institute Journal (Victoria)" P36 when discussing changes in the Victorian Wills Act 1997 (making it more like NSW)
From Buttlers will dispute lawyers adversing site
**No age limit on family provision claims**
**Eric Butler can help ensure you secure what is a fair share of the will.**
If you look at the statistics page on this site there's a phenomenon you will notice. The larger the estate the larger the legal bill. The lawyers say that this is because the larger estates are more complex. But when you read the cases you soon realise that this is not the case. Most estates consist of one or two properties and a few shares, there are a couple of people who were close to the deceased and one or two that abandoned the deceased. The primary difference is the value of the estate, not the complexity, but some how the cost expand to take up what ever can be skimmed off.
Q Who won the most in these cases ?
Cobb v Cobb [2012] NSWSC 97 (20 February 2012) Estate of $160,000 Lawyers got over $57K or 36%
Ivy Agnes Maud Twomey v Neridah McDonald (2 February 2012) Estate of $627,000 Lawyers got over $186K or 29%
Hatton v HattonHatton v Hatton [2012] NSWSC 182 (8 March 2012) Estate of $933,000 Lawyers got over $254K or 27%
Cooper v McNeice; Munday v McNeice (27 April 2012) Estate of $760,000 Lawyers got over $197K or 26%
A The lawyers.