Solicitor missing inheritance for 8 years!

hoju19

Looking to see if anyone has experience of a solicitor missing part of the estate during probate then not contacting you for years.

We completed probate on my fathers estate 8 years ago, everything went to my mother and was sold and subsequently invested for her (significant amount of shares and investments)

We have now been informed that they have been holding some shares and the dividends from them for 8 years, despite that they could have contracted us at any time to resolve it.

What action should we be taking as this has meant digging up all the previous paperwork, having to relook at all his estate and frankly for my mum a lot of memories she'd rather not have had to go over again.

Financially it is only a few thousand but the solicitor seems to want to just pay it out and thats is but if we had had the money at the time it would have been worth significantly more by now.

Anyone any experience of this?

Margot123

It might be that the solicitor who dealt with it at the time has recently retired and this has only just come to light.

I would imagine you have cause to claim interest on what should have been paid out, as it was a professional oversight.

Keep_pedalling

We recently had something similar with a missing bank account for 7 years with over £13k in it. They simply paid the IHT due on it and gave my wife the rest.

In my wifes case it seems it was a matter of the account only coming to light after the bank contacted the solicitors, so although we would have been much better off with this money sitting in our S&Ss ISAs their does not seem to be any blame attached to the executors we have just accepted this.

You should take the payment and if you believe you have a legitimate complaint, put that into the solicitors complaint department in the first instance, and take it to the SRA if you are not satisfied with their response.

http://www.lawsociety.org.uk/for-the-public/using-a-solicitor/complaints/