Printed will integrity

reheat

Anyone had any dealings with Co-op Legal Services?

Keep_pedalling

reheat said:

Anyone had any dealings with Co-op Legal Services?

All I will say is that you should avoid all national will writing companies and choose a local solicitor. If you are thinking about including an immediate post death trust in your wills then look to a STEP qualified one. 

reheat

Keep_pedalling said:

reheat said:

Anyone had any dealings with Co-op Legal Services?

All I will say is that you should avoid all national will writing companies and choose a local solicitor. If you are thinking about including an immediate post death trust in your wills then look to a STEP qualified one. 

OK thanks. I don't think we should be needing a IPD but will keep it in mind. We've been married 40+ years and neither married before. Only beneficiaries would be our children.

reheat

So how do you go about finding a good local solicitor? They can look good on paper and have all the right credentials, but I know people who have still fallen foul of some appallingly incompetent, uncaring ones. And yes you can get recompense if they have the right memberships, but the fallout can be pretty awful, especially if it falls to others to sort after you re gone.

Keep_pedalling

reheat said:

Keep_pedalling said:

reheat said:

Anyone had any dealings with Co-op Legal Services?

All I will say is that you should avoid all national will writing companies and choose a local solicitor. If you are thinking about including an immediate post death trust in your wills then look to a STEP qualified one. 

OK thanks. I don't think we should be needing a IPD but will keep it in mind. We've been married 40+ years and neither married before. Only beneficiaries would be our children.

Much like us, we have not bothered with an IPDI trust either.

Keep_pedalling

reheat said:

So how do you go about finding a good local solicitor? They can look good on paper and have all the right credentials, but I know people who have still fallen foul of some appallingly incompetent, uncaring ones. And yes you can get recompense if they have the right memberships, but the fallout can be pretty awful, especially if it falls to others to sort after you re gone.

All solicitors are regulated by the SRA which is where any claim would end up. Ask around friends and family to see if say have made a will recently.

Section62

reheat said:

If someone's will is being read after their death, and it is simply a load of separately printed sheets in an envelope or something, how can there be any confidence that one or more sheets have not been modified and replaced since the will was written? How can the integrity of such a will be trusted? Presumably not every page has to be signed and witnessed?

Without needing to get into complex forensic techniques, the fiddler would have to use the same type of paper from the same manufacturer (especially if watermarked) because it is quite easy to feel the difference between different papers.  It wouldn't be proof of nefarious activity, but a page of a will which was printed on a different paper to the rest ought to raise suspicions.

Assuming the fiddler obtains a supply of the exact same paper they still need to exactly replicate the layout parameters (margins, line spacing, font etc) of the original.  Which is unlikely for an amateur to be able to do very easily without access to the original electronic document on the same computer.

Also, printers are likely to incorporate tracking technology which will mark each page printed with various encoded information such as print date/time, model, serial number, page count etc.  Effectively a fingerprint.  Depending on method, this isn't something you necessarily need a forensic lab to check.  The tracking technology could confirm (or not) whether all the pages were printed at the same time on the same machine.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printer_tracking_dots

So the easy bit is substituting the page.  The difficult bit is not getting caught.

boingy

reheat said:

Anyone had any dealings with Co-op Legal Services?

Co-op are will writers rather than solicitors but, unlike most will writers, they are regulated.