Will Aid and the Certainty National Will Register are to join forces permanently following a successful trial during last year’s Will Aid campaign. Certainty provided free will registration to 3,500 people during the campaign, which saw 12,000 people visit solicitors to make a will. Lawyers waived their fees in return for a suggested donation to the Will Aid charity.

For more information, read about contingency fee advice.

Morrisons Solicitors is one of Surrey’s leading law firms who has been providing legal services for over 200 years and is a Legal 500 listed firm.

David Kingham, Head of Private Client, Morrisons says: “We offer Will registration to existing and new clients and the level of interest is very good. Our approach to offering Will registration to a client is an information process that encourages them to register without feeling that they are having something sold to them. We regard it as very important that a Will is registered and we give a default position to the client regarding registration of their Will as standard. If a client perceives that they do not have a need to register their Will we explain how registration aims to minimise the risk of difficulties in the future. Informing clients of these difficulties and how they can occur allows the client to make a truly informed and enlightened decision on registering their Will. Simply, we inform them of the benefits.”

Morrisons also report a 7.5% uplift in requests from clients to review their Wills following communication regarding registering them. With over 400 solicitor practices throughout England and Wales now using the Will register it is clear that the profession is becoming very proficient at offering Will registration.

Be Safe and use Certainty to register your will on the UK’s National Will Register.

Will Aid is endorsed by the Probate Section of the Law Society who encourage their members to participate.

Will Aid is one of the most effective fundraising campaigns and depends on a unique partnership with the legal profession. Will Aid would like more solicitors to join to meet the demand from Will makers. To register as a Will Aid solicitor and take part in this years campaign log on to www.willaid.org.uk/solicitors

Be Safe and use Certainty to register your will on the UK’s National Will Register.

Importantly, private client retention and development has been cleverly integrated into Certainty. This ensures Certainty is a powerful and vital resource for firms to help protect and increase private client work.

With the legal landscape changing daily and at a pace, Certainty’s success is testimony to the tangible benefits that are being realised by Private Client teams all over the UK everyday.

To find out more please contact Certainty on 0845 408 0404 or email solicitors@certainty.co.uk.
Be Safe and use Certainty to register your will on the UK’s National Will Register.

Certainty has been touring the country meeting Wills & Probate solicitors and STEP members at various legal conferences. At these conferences Certainty provides a brief overview of Will Search and Will Registration and the innovative Will management and marketing system ‘TOUCH’. If you are attending the forthcoming STEP conference then please do not hesitate to visit the Certainty stand for this brief and very valuable overview.

Be Safe and use Certainty to register your will on the UK’s National Will Register.

The truth is you are no longer simply competing with the solicitors down the road.  The market has in recent years become much more competitive with other organisations entering the private client market and traditional areas of work being offered in different ways. Furthermore, over the next five years private client practitioners can expect to experience even greater threats and competition as the effects of the Legal Services Act begin to be fully felt.

If you, as a private client practitioner are concerned about the level and sophistication of the competition, then you should be S and it will only get tougher over the next few years.

So what in practical terms should you be considering in light of these threats? Here are the top 5 key issues that ought to be on your real and mental agendas for discussion:

1.Focus on personal performance marketing skills - Ask yourself these questions. How would you rate yourself and your colleagues when it comes to sales, influencing, writing and networking skills? If these are not strong points and you have had no real training in these areas then you are always going to be on the back foot. The big high street brand names who you may have to compete with, will have people who are very comfortable and highly trained in these personal skill areas. Like it or not your legal skills will be a given to most private clients. If you want to be able to compete in the years to come you need to ensure that all your team at all levels have beefed up their personal performance marketing skills. Think about it. They all either deal with enquiries from prospective clients, talk to existing clients or know and meet people who are potential clients in the future.

2. Don’t be a www firm! - You all know what www stands for. I have an alternative meaning to describe many practices I have met in the last year.  It stands for ‘worry’, ‘winge’ and ‘wait’! Many practitioners tell me how worried they are about the external threats, then ‘winge’ about how bad things have got and how ³this isn’t the legal profession they entered² S but what do they do about it? They ‘wait’ to see what others are doing and in the meantime do nothing! I can tell you S right now there are opportunities out there to be taken advantage of. The longer you wait however, the less chance you will have to find and exploit them.

3. Strengthen your relationships with your existing clients – This is very important indeed. Focus on this before you spend your marketing budget attempting to generate new business. The rationale for this is very simple.
Your competitors will be after your clients. You need to secure your relationship with them now to make them feel like you are ‘their’ legal firm. The object is to make them as uncomfortable as possible about going elsewhere.

The key thing is to keep in touch with your clients as often as possible once a matter has been concluded. This of course needs to be for things that are for the client’s benefit, without bombarding them with too much junk post or e mail.

Two good things worth considering that help in this respect, are offers to review past Wills they have made, or perhaps an invitation to them to register their Will through your firm with Certainty the national Will Register. Both of these demonstrate client service, cement your relationship and are potentially  revenue producing.

4. Work with others – As you cast your eye over the growing competition, you will see a pattern emerging of people and organisations with different strengths joining together for mutual benefit. Typically, both are able to bring something different to the party. The model of private client practitioners from legal firms providing front line Wills and Probate services for large brand names is a good example of this. Actively, discuss and explore the question S who can you work with?

5. Review your opening hours - I rang a firm two days ago at 9.20 a.m. S believe it or not as a prospective client. A recorded message greeted me with an message that they don’t open until 9.30 a.m! As simple as it may seem, start to ask questions about your opening hours and accessibility. Many of the brand names and your new competitors will simply generate more clients and business because they are open and available when you are not!

Be Safe and use Certainty to register your will on the UK’s National Will Register.

Searching for a Will has never been so simple. Certainty’s Will Search service replaces the haphazard system under which a family has to ³guess² which law firm might have custody of a loved one’s Will. All too often Wills are deemed lost or presumed never written and are difficult to trace, near impossible some would say.

Apart from the beneficiaries anguish, not being able to find a Will has detrimental effects on the solicitor who wrote it. They do not get the opportunity to administer the Will and indeed the opportunity to take care of the testators’ beneficiaries.

A consumer survey commissioned by Certainty showed that 67% of people do not know where their parents’ Wills are located. There can be many reasons why a Will cannot be located and therefore is presumed lost or indeed never written. The passage of time, house moves and even malicious destruction are all key factors as to why the Will cannot be found when it is needed. This is extremely unfortunate when in most cases the Will is safely stored in a solicitor’s office somewhere.

Certainty has changed the way the legal profession can search for a Will.

This is due to Certainty’s revolutionary National Will Search service. The Law Society has endorsed Certainty as the exclusive provider of a Will Search service for the legal profession. The Certainty Will Search technology is highly intelligent and took two years to develop. To action a Will search takes just 60 seconds. Most importantly you can activate this search from your desk without the need for software or any IT upgrade giving you immediate access, saving time, effort and cost traditionally associated with generating letters and postal charges.

Indeed a comprehensive National Will Search can be performed in most cases for less than the cost of the postage alone.

The Certainty National Will register can search for a registered or an unregistered Will at the touch of a button.

According to the Law Commission, many tens of thousands of people die intestate each year, causing human and economic costs for large number of families when they are already financially and emotionally vulnerable.

Mark Bradley, Certainty comments: ³Through research it is clear that many solicitors hold Wills where the testator has died but have not had the probate work. Being unaware of which solicitor wrote the Will is inevitable in the absence of an effective Will Search service, Certainty’s Will Search service is changing this situation in an extremely positive way for the profession.

Be Safe and use Certainty to register your will on the UK’s National Will Register.

Certainty has teamed up with the UK’s most enduring and successful charity Will-making scheme Will Aid in support of their November campaign.

Throughout November, the public can have a basic Will professionally drawn up by a solicitor free of charge. Participating solicitors are generously offering this service to raise as much money as possible for the Will Aid charities: ActionAid, British Red Cross, Christian Aid, Help the Aged, NSPCC, Save the Children UK, Sightsavers International, SCIAF and Trocaire. In return for this free Will writing service a donation at the suggested level Wills can also be registered for FREE with the Certainty National Wills Register during November’s Will Aid campaign.

The 2008 Will Aid campaign was the most successful ever. To date, more than £920,000 (including Gift Aid) has been received (approximately 12,000 Wills written under the scheme during the month). In addition gifts to one or more charities in left in Wills totalling over £5.4 million has been promised to the Will Aid charities, helping to ensure that their vital work can continue to help future generations.

It’s a difficult one Should people who are cohabiting have the right to claim the estates of their loved ones when they die in the same way bereaved spouses or civil partners do? The UK Law Commission says yes. But others say that if the cohabitees had meant their partners to have a share of their wealth they would have either got married or written a will. Dig deeper and the argument becomes one about protecting the “specialness” of marriage.

There is an anomaly here, though. The laws on intestacy – what happens when someone dies without a will – date back to the 1920s, a time when cohabitation was, in the eyes of the middle classes, akin to running a brothel. Fortunately, we live in more liberal times, and while I do think that marriage (and civil partnerships) should be encouraged through the tax system, it’s a strange sort of morality that can watch someone who was clearly precious to the deceased go without – and often suffer huge hardship – all for the supposed greater good. If you’re living with someone, think about who is more important in your life – the person you wake up with each morning or some cousin you may see once in a blue moon? Because under intestacy law, it’s your cousin who has a chance of inheriting while your dearest doesn’t.

What’s more, anyone who has had an unmarried partner dangerously ill or die knows that, from the moment they get involved in anything bureaucratic or healthcare-related, their rights are zilch compared with the blood relatives’. For instance, and I speak from personal experience, even if the stricken individual actually had nothing to do with the family, they get to dictate who visits the bedside; the partner is there on sufferance. Put simply, in our society we don’t properly recognise the “specialness” of committing to live together. Amending the intestacy laws would be a start to correcting this.

For me, the best approach would be to allow live-in partners a portion of the estate under reformed intestacy laws, but at the same time encourage far more people to make a will. Turn the whole argument around; say to people, if you don’t want your live-in partner to inherit then make a will. (Although, if you don’t want them to inherit what are you doing with them?)

Generally, people don’t make a will because they are intimidated by the cost, the legal language and their own mortality. More people would be happier making a will if the industry were visibly regulated rather than having the Law Society governing solicitors and no one overlooking the will-writing firms, some of which employ tactics that even dodgy commission salespeople in the financial-services industry would baulk at. Most of this is solvable with a bit of clear thinking, but if you’re living with someone and don’t have a will, why not take advantage of Will Aid month starting today (see page 91) where you can get a will drawn up for a fraction of the normal cost.

Be Safe and use Certainty to register your will on the UK’s National Will Register.

Pensioners are being urged to draft ‘living wills’ in case they become incapacitated. As The Mail on Sunday reported last week, thousands of families each year have to apply to the Court of Protection if a relative is struck down with dementia or other long-term illnesses.

But families can avoid a distressing and expensive court procedure if they draw up a lasting power of attorney, which allows you to nominate someone to act on your behalf if you can no longer make decisions for yourself.

Caroline Bielanska, chairwoman of trade body Solicitors for the Elderly, says: ‘You have to think of a lasting power of attorney as a way to take control of what could happen to you, and not as losing control of your affairs.’

But more than half of adults have not even discussed the issue with older relatives, says the Equity Release Solicitors’ Association. About 8,000 lasting power of attorneys are registered each month, but this is a fraction of those who could benefit. There are more than 700,000 people with dementia, says the Alzheimer’s Society.

There are two kinds of lasting power of attorney in England and Wales. A Property and Affairs LPA gives someone authority to make decisions about your financial affairs. A Personal Welfare LPA lets someone make decisions about your welfare, though far fewer opt for this.
In Scotland a Continuing Power of Attorney allows someone to act on your behalf in financial matters. A Welfare Power of Attorney allows them to deal with your personal affairs too. The person granting the LPA chooses who will act for them. The attorney is often a spouse, but experts also recommend that you appoint a second person, such as an adult son or daughter.

Peter Barton, partner at Ashfords Solicitors in Tiverton, Devon, says: ‘In some cases, such as selling a jointly owned home, a spouse who is an attorney cannot act alone.’

No LPA can be used until it is registered with the Office of the Public Guardian or the Office of the Public Guardian (Scotland).

Sorting out the financial affairs of her late brother prompted Mavis Haslam and her husband Jack to draft their own powers of attorney. Mavis, from Bolton, Lancashire, says: ‘He died without making a will and coping with that made me determined to leave our affairs in good order.’

Keen golfers Mavis, 68, and Jack, 71, who ran a pharmacy, wanted to get their powers of attorney drawn up while they were in good health and have appointed each other attorneys along with their son, John, 41. Mavis says: ‘It gives us peace of mind.’

It is possible to set up your own power of attorney. Forms can be downloaded from thisismoney.co.uk/living-wills. The fee to register the application is £120 (£65 in Scotland). Those on some benefits are exempt from fees.

But the paperwork is complex and as part of the process a ‘professional’ person must certify you understand the implications and are not acting under coercion, so most applicants pay a solicitor to help them.  Legal fees start from about £175 plus VAT.

Be Safe and use Certainty to register a will on the UK’s National Will Register.