By Legal Futures Associate Exizent
- Solicitors using Exizent can now access financial data about a deceased individual directly on platform at click of a button.
- Partnership with Experian speeds-up estate discovery process and reduces the burden on executors.
- New functionality does what currently takes a solicitor up to four weeks on average in a matter of minutes.
Legal technology firm Exizent has announced the launch of automated estate discovery process for solicitors through its partnership with Experian, one of the world’s leading global information services company.
The new functionality addresses a major challenge for legal services practitioners by making the process of identifying key banking assets and financial liabilities associated with an estate faster and more reliable, including those not necessarily known to relatives or family executors. Legal professionals and firms using the Exizent platform now have access to an Experian report with data about the deceased in minutes, a process that often takes a solicitor many weeks to complete.
Currently, most legal professionals find assets and liabilities of the deceased by reviewing their will and talking to family members and executors, who often need to do a lot of digging themselves or instruct slow and expensive third party searches, during what is already a difficult and costly period. Through Exizent, solicitors now have access to Experian data directly within the platform, enabling them to retrieve details of the deceased’s banking assets and liabilities, such as mortgages, credit cards, loans, and even mobile phone contracts.
Exizent research earlier this year found that 88% of legal firms think the bereavement process is ‘slow and inefficient’ and a majority (52%) of industry professionals think their firm could handle probate more efficiently, and that the time taken is unreasonable. This partnership between Exizent and Experian will help address this and reduce the burden on solicitors and their clients alike.
Nick Cousins, Founder and CEO of Exizent, said: “Having gone through probate myself, I know all too well the strain that the process puts on those involved in the process. The launch of this capability through our partnership with Experian is a major step towards improving the way probate is handled in future, making the process far simpler and faster. We’re excited to be launching something that can have such a huge benefit for legal services firms.”
Grant Giles, Director – Partnerships & Alliances at Experian, says: “Building meaningful partnerships is at the core of what we do and with the strong data available that shows the asset discovery phase needs to be made better, teaming-up with Exizent to make this a reality made perfect sense. The benefits of automated financial information and account history in this area are huge, and we are excited to see how this plays out in the probate space in the years ahead.”
As the world continues to become more digitised and transparent, and with easier access to information, automated estate discovery will become increasingly important for solicitors. It can reduce the number of manual or paper-based searches, which currently account for more than 50% of information gathering on assets and liabilities held by the deceased in a probate case. With fewer people having bank statements and utility bills lying around their homes than ever before, this process helps remove the risk of missing assets or liabilities, and creates a better, quicker and more secure probate experience for everyone.
