We are pleased to announce that when you use a Certainty Will Search Combined you can now include a search of Will Writers from both the Institute of Professional Will Writers (IPW) and The Society of Will Writers (SWW) in your search.
So why is this important?
These are two key organisations that are not regulated by the SRA but are responsible for the majority of Wills written by Will writers in the UK. The SWW has 1700 members throughout the UK ranging from small to large organisations and write circa 200,000 Wills per annum. The IPW is also a large national organisation with hundreds of members responsible for writing a significant volume of Wills each year across their membership base.
The feedback from law firms regarding this enhancement to their Will search service has been extremely positive. Preventing the distribution of an estate where a Will was deemed not to exist but was actually held by a Will writer, or where a Will writer wrote a Will that revoked the Will being used to distribute the estate by the solicitor, could potentially be far more problematic to resolve than if this unknown Will was held by another solicitor.
Since the Will writers search capability was introduced into the Certainty Will Search Combined it has prevented exactly this from happening; solicitors have searched only to find an unknown Will, either believed to not to have existed or a later Will held by the Will writer.
By way of an example, 46 Wills which were written and held at one IPW Will writing organisation have been identified by searches where the searcher was a solicitor dealing with the estate distribution. Fortunately in these cases the solicitors involved undertook a Certainty Will Search Combined and discovered these unknown Wills. The majority of these searches were implemented purely as a precautionary measure.
A Certainty Will Search Combined performs a Register Will Search and searches nationally in geographically targeted areas for Wills that have not been registered by solicitors and now Will writers. We hope that this additional search capability provides further peace of mind and protection. A Certainty Will Search Combined is an allowable disbursement from the estate of £95 +vat.
Do you need to search for a Will that may have been written in Scotland or Northern Ireland?
Did you know that you could search Scotland and Northern Ireland using a Certainty Will Search? For further information on the types of searches you can carry out please contact us on 0330 100 3660 or email enquiries@certainty.co.uk.
