Solicitor’s negligence when drafting a will leaves the beneficiaries £62,500 short of the money inte

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Solicitor’s Negligence When Drafting A Will Leaves The Beneficiaries £62,500 Short Of The Money Intended For Them It is very important to get help from experienced solicitors when drafting a Will, advise CurryPopeck Solicitors. Doing so will protect the interests of your beneficiaries, and will ensure your wishes are respected after your death. The recent case of Herring & Anor v Shorts Financial Services emphasises the need for having good legal advice: In this case, the Judge ruled that the solicitor was negligent when drafting a Will for his client, leaving two of the beneficiaries £62,500 short of what was intended for them.

Following Mrs. Shemwell’s death in 2012, two beneficiaries of her estate (Mr. Herring and Ms. Hartley) issued proceedings against Mrs. Shemwell’sfinancial adviser at Shorts Financial Services, Robert Sully, and solicitor, Rob Woodhead,who drafted the Will, after they did not receive the full amount of the £200,000, intended for each of them after she died in 2012.

The claim against the solicitor was settled following a mediation in December 2015; the claim against the financial adviser, however, continued to trial.

The claim was brought by the two beneficiaries of the Will, Mr. Herring and Ms. Hartley, on the grounds that he failed to explainto Mrs. Shemwell that a loan trust he set up for her, in order to mitigate the inheritance tax payable on her death would form part of her taxable estate at death.

Mrs. Shemwell wanted to leave as much of this money as possible to her two relatives, Claire Hartley and Tim Herring, while protecting it from inheritance tax as far as possible, which prompted the consultation with Robert Sully of Shorts Financial Services. Robert Sully advised her to put £175,000 into a discretionary trust and the rest

2 of the amount, totalling £125,000 in a loan trust naming Hartley and Herring as the sole beneficiaries.

After Mrs Shemwell had done this, she made a new Will. She gave initial instructions to her solicitor Rob Woodhead at a meeting, who later went on to draft the Will, but did not make any enquiries about the terms or nature of the trusts. He instead relied on a short conversation and information contained in an aide-memoire which Sully had prepared for his own benefit for a meeting.Seven months later, when Mrs. Shemwell died, the loan trust into which she had invested £125,000, passed to her estate and thus became liable to IHT. This meant Herring and Hartley were both left £62,500 short of the full amount intended for them, state the solicitors at CurryPopeck.

The matter was taken to the court, where the judge held that the financial adviser did not have a duty of care to the claimants as he had not been involved in the Will-making process and the claim was therefore dismissed. However, he remarked that the solicitor had breached his duty of care to both the claimants and his deceased client. He should have made sufficient enquiries to satisfy himself that the relevant trust monies would in fact pass on to the claimants after Mrs. Shemwell’s death.

According to Lionel Curry, senior solicitor at Curry Popeck, the lesson for all of us from this case is if one really wants to safeguard their financial security now and in the future, they should choose their solicitor with great care. Contact the law experts at Curry Popeck, for further advice here: http://www.currypopeck.com/