Will solicitor insolvent - advice needed

bob69

Hi all, about 7-8 years ago, my partner & I (unmarried, with 2 teenage children), took out a Will using a small local firm of solicitors, who I now understand were specialising in mortgages, but included Will writing amongst their services. I have recently tried to contact them to possibly make some updates / changes, & answer a few questions we now have, but they were not returning my calls & emails. After checking the gov.uk website, I now have strong reasons to believe they were made insolvent last year, & wonder where this leaves us with regards to the will we draughted with them?
We have our own copy of the will, but I am unsure of what our next step should be? Is there a regulatory body we can contact? Would the original Will still be legally binding? Are we required to pay a fee to make any changes?
It sounds naive as I write this, but alarm bells should have rang when we were told at the time that we had to pay £20 per annum to 'store' the will, but we have never had any payments taken, & any further communication was limited to a missed call from the firm, & subsequent brief text message chat in 2022, whereby the solicitor informed me that he was looking for another person with my name & contacted me by mistake. 
Any advice given would be greatly appreciated. If this post is located in the wrong area of the forum, please accept my apologies & move accordingly. Thanks. 

bryanb

Yes the will is still valid. Any new will you write revokes all previous wills.

MyRealNameToo

bob69 said:

Hi all, about 7-8 years ago, my partner & I (unmarried, with 2 teenage children), took out a Will using a small local firm of solicitors, who I now understand were specialising in mortgages, but included Will writing amongst their services. I have recently tried to contact them to possibly make some updates / changes, & answer a few questions we now have, but they were not returning my calls & emails. After checking the gov.uk website, I now have strong reasons to believe they were made insolvent last year, & wonder where this leaves us with regards to the will we draughted with them?
We have our own copy of the will, but I am unsure of what our next step should be? Is there a regulatory body we can contact? Would the original Will still be legally binding? Are we required to pay a fee to make any changes?
It sounds naive as I write this, but alarm bells should have rang when we were told at the time that we had to pay £20 per annum to 'store' the will, but we have never had any payments taken, & any further communication was limited to a missed call from the firm, & subsequent brief text message chat in 2022, whereby the solicitor informed me that he was looking for another person with my name & contacted me by mistake. 
Any advice given would be greatly appreciated. If this post is located in the wrong area of the forum, please accept my apologies & move accordingly. Thanks. 

When a law firm goes bust their client documents are passed to another firm who takes over storage of the documents. This is arranged by the SRA and the new holder of the documents should try and contact the owners to advise they now hold them but how successful this is depends on the record keeping. A friend's wife died earlier this year and it turned out her will had been passed between 4 law firms because the original had gone bust, then the SRA appointed intervention agent also went bust etc. 

If you have an original copy then its all fine, unfortunately friend only had a partial photocopy so needed to find the original. The will remains valid irrespective of what's happened to the law firm but clearly if there is an issue with the will the ability to claim against the drafter ends when the law firm dies. 

As soon as a new will is drafted it automatically overrides the former will. So if you want to make a new will thats fine, just get rid of the old version and ensure the new one is appropriately stored. 

Dave_5150

You can store your will and/or codicils with HMCTS for a one off fee of £23.

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/store-a-will-with-the-probate-service

doodling

Hi,

A key point here is that a will is a paper document with original wet signatures.  Is that what you have in your hands, or do you merely have a photocopy?

If you were to die then the original would be needed.  If you (or more importantly your executor(s)) don't know where that is then you have a problem.

(I should note that probate counts can occasionally be convinced to accept a copy of a will under some circumstances but that is not an easy or guaranteed process).

In your case, the problem is a small one as you want to change your will anyway.  All you need to do is get a new one produced and once it has been signed and witnessed it automatically supersedes the previous one.

Once you have got your new will, you need to think about where it is to be stored - a solicitor is one option, HMCTS is another, keeping it yourself is a third, giving it to your executor (they're the one who will need it after all) is a fourth, there are more...

It is good practise (but not essential) to think about what would happen if the new will was lost and the old one found - if this would create a more serious issue than dying intestate then you might want to ensure that the old one has been destroyed.

singhini

I think the existing will is still legally binding and thankfully you have a copy of it.
You say in your original post you would like to make changes and so I would be tempted to just re-write it with a new firm and thus the new will would take precedence (i would assume this means you don't need to worry about the old one or the old solicitors). 

Might be a good idea to store it with HMCTS as pointed out in Dave_5150's post  (i was not aware of this service but will be looking into it with regards to my own will).

EDIT: Ignore my post (Doodling posted quicker and more informatively than i).

You might want to write something like “I hereby revoke all former wills and codicils.” when you start to write the new will (but the new solicitor should be able to advise how best to revoke any previous will)

bob69

Thank you to everyone for their replies & advice. I have a number of updates.
It transpires that we don't actually have a copy of the Will as my partner intimated to me, merely 2 x laminated commentaries with each of our names on. 
I have contacted both the SRA, who advised me to contact the FCA, because the firm are not listed with the SRA, but gave me their FCA number. I then contacted the FCA regarding this firm, & they have informed me that they are still on their register for various regulated activities, but as Will services isn't one of them they are unable to help me any further. They gave me a mobile number, which I already had, & I have already left repeated voicemails on without any success so far, other than a seemingly automated text message reply of 'I'll call you right back', which I received exactly 1 minute after I rang the number last week, & nothing else since. The registered FCA address is now different to the address we originally visited when we signed up, yet the old address is still listed on their website.
I have just left another voicemail, & a further email to a different email address that the FCA provided, & am currently awaiting a reply. If they continue to avoid me, which is seemingly what is happening, I am unsure of what my next course of action should be? All I wish to do now, is recover the original, & have it stored safely using the link kindly provided earlier in the thread. 
Any further advice would again be very greatly appreciated. 

Newly_retired

Since you said in your first post that you wanted to ask questions and make some changes, you should start again with a new solicitor, not will writing services. Get the solicitor to store the will, or HMCTs. This will supersedes the old one. Give your futile attempts to locate the old one, once you have a new will you can safely forget about this company you are attempting to pursue.

MyRealNameToo

bob69 said:

The registered FCA address is now different to the address we originally visited when we signed up, yet the old address is still listed on their website.

Could be their registered address which may well be different from their trading address. It's not uncommon for smaller firms to use their accountants address for example. 

Have you looked them up on Companies House? If they were ceasing to trade and winding up the company notices should be filed there. 

Will writing isnt a regulated activity and whilst a non-solicitor may charge less there are benefits of using a solicitor particularly if you are going to ask them to store the original. 

Keep_pedalling

So they were not actually solicitors. Just get new wills made and this time actually use a solicitor. While you are at it you should seriously think about your marital status. If either of you has assets exceeding £325k on top of grieving for a lost partner you could be looking at funding a significant IHT liability. 

singhini

OP - you might also want to listen to last week's Martin Lewis podcast dated 18th September as it discusses Wills
Its currently available on BBC Sounds