The bank freezes the account, sends its condolences, and asks for a document called a grant of probate. For many people that is the first time the word has meant anything, and it arrives in the same fortnight as the funeral.
The grant is the court's confirmation that the executor named in the will has authority to collect the estate's assets, pay its debts and pass on what remains. Whether you need a solicitor to get one depends less on the law than on the estate in front of you.
Estates an executor can handle alone
Personal applications are allowed and common. Where there is a valid will, the assets are a home in the deceased's sole name and ordinary bank accounts, the estate sits comfortably below the inheritance tax threshold and the beneficiaries are few and on speaking terms, a patient executor can do this without professional help. The forms are public, the probate registry deals with personal applicants every day, and small balances are sometimes released without any grant at all, since each bank sets its own threshold for that. What the do-it-yourself route costs is time: valuing everything, reporting to HMRC where required, chasing institutions, waiting.
Features that change the job
Some estates repay professional help many times over. Inheritance tax that has to be calculated, claimed against and sometimes paid before the grant is issued. A business, a farm, or property abroad. A will that leaves out a close family member who might bring a claim. A trust written into the will. Doubt about whether the estate can cover its debts, because an insolvent estate must be paid out in a strict legal order and getting that order wrong is serious. Behind all of these sits a fact executors tend to learn late: an executor who distributes the estate wrongly can be personally liable to beneficiaries and creditors. The solicitor's fee, seen properly, is partly insurance against your own honest mistakes.
The middle route most people miss
Instructing a solicitor is not all or nothing. Plenty of firms will quote a fixed fee for one defined piece of the work: preparing the inheritance tax account, obtaining the grant while you handle the collecting and distributing, or advising on a single worrying clause. If the estate is mostly simple with one hard corner, buying advice on the corner is often the sensible spend. Ask any firm you approach to price the pieces separately before you agree to hand over the whole administration.
Deciding which estate you have
Before speaking to anyone, make two lists: everything the person owned, roughly valued, and everything they owed. Those two lists answer most of the questions above, and any solicitor you do instruct will ask for them in the first meeting anyway. If the lists are short and the will is clean, consider doing it yourself. If either list makes you hesitate, that hesitation is information.
This site lists 2,926 solicitors' firms, and the listings show which handle probate and estate administration in your area. Look through probate firms near you, or describe the estate briefly and let firms quote for the parts you want help with. Write the two lists first. They are the document everything else builds on.
