Where there's a will there's a war

There are many routes to challenging a will - but 'it's not fair' and 'I deserve more' just won't do.

The law generally gives us freedom to dispose of our property after death however we wish. But it also allows those we have slighted in our wills the right to challenge those choices. Disputes over wills and inheritances are nothing new - Dickens's fictional case of Jarndyce v Jarndyce in Bleak House only ended when the entire estate of the deceased had been swallowed up by legal costs.

To judge by the column inches they attract, this is the new divorce. The cases have all the elements of human drama - money, family feuds, long-buried grudges, painful rejection, often mistresses and dark secrets - and are all the more intriguing because the key witness is, by definition, unavailable.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/law/2010/dec/07/neil-rose-will-disputes

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Will’s are there to stop these sort of thing, though that was the ideal, it seems so long ago now that it doesn’t seem that way at all. From Property to Life Insurance Trusts every word and letter is increasingly being disputed by family causing strife and rifts that can’t be healed. It’s best to sit down and have a honest and frank discussion with family when a will is being drawn up. It seems this is the only way now to keep the courts free of such contests, hopefully gone will be the days of the clichéd shock and anger you see on bad soap operas of the will reading.