Legal Cost of a Probate

BizAngel

My mother in law died last year. In her will she left her main asset (house) to her 4 children. She had no other liabilities or assets. The two executors are 2 professionals so there has been very little hand holding by the solicitor. The executors set up and control the executors bank account. In fact all dealings have been with the practice legal executive. The house is going to be vested between the 4 children. The legal executive has presented a bill of €6000 plus VAT for the probate and vesting work. After questioning the size of the bill they were told that there was in excess of 80 hours of work done.

It is very difficult to believe that there has been 2 full weeks of work on a very straightforward probate case. Is this amount of work and the bill reasonable?

coylemj

You shouldn't have let the solicitor near the probate work, you could have done most of the work yourselves but transferring the deeds of the house into the names of the four children would require a professional though unless one of them wanted to sell his/her share or take out a mortgage, you could have left this task (transfer of name on deeds) until later.

If the work was straightforward as you claim then you should have agreed a flat fee with the solicitor in advance, it's too late to start complaining now.

I did probate for the estate of a relative who died a few years ago and though it was very 'straightforward', there was an awful lot of letter writing and talking to banks, credit unions, Social Welfare (to cancel a pension) and so on, there is quite a lot of legwork even in straightforward cases.

Cat Melodeon

My parents died without a will and we were pretty clueless as to what needed to be done, so we left all of the work to our solicitor. This involved transfer of house and property to 5 siblings, a more complicated land transfer where the titles had not been fully signed over to my father, closing bank accounts, sorting out life insurance policy and pension payout, transfer of a small number of shares and a court hearing to appoint guardianship of my youngest sibling. Our total bill was just over €9,000.

The process was very dragged out as there was some misunderstanding within the firm as to who was handling our case and it was neglected for a number of months. However there was a significant amount of work to be done as my dad was very bad with paperwork and the solicitor had to track down accounts and contributions paid in other countries. I was cc-ed all email correspondence and most other documents and felt that the final bill was fair.

I would question your bill - 6k seems awfully high when a lot of the work was done by the executors.

grumpytrousers

BizAngel wrote: »

My mother in law died last year. In her will she left her main asset (house) to her 4 children. She had no other liabilities or assets. The two executors are 2 professionals so there has been very little hand holding by the solicitor. The executors set up and control the executors bank account. In fact all dealings have been with the practice legal executive. The house is going to be vested between the 4 children. The legal executive has presented a bill of €6000 plus VAT for the probate and vesting work. After questioning the size of the bill they were told that there was in excess of 80 hours of work done.

It is very difficult to believe that there has been 2 full weeks of work on a very straightforward probate case. Is this amount of work and the bill reasonable?

As a solicitor I find that utterly unbelievable. Sorry, OP, I'm not saying you're telling porkies, but honest to God, in order to administer an estate with ONE asset, it took 80 hours work? Fecks sakes, for that kind of time/effort, I hope the Grant of Probate looks like the Book of Kells...

Don't let this one go. If what you're saying is true, then it's friggers like that who give the rest of us a bad name; that kind of gouging is, IMHO, unconscionable.

BizAngel

Thanks GrumpyTrousers...your reply is very helpful..