An element of our role as estate planners is to educate our clients on the various products and services we offer that can help to solve thier problems. We will sometimes run into a difficulty in that education that is difficult to detect and handle - false data. This episode looks at how we can identify and then handle our client's false data.

I was recently invited on to the Today's Wills and Probate podcast to talk about regulation and the Competition and Markets Authority consultation. This episode is a reproduction of that interview in full.

Land and property ownership in the UK will be either held under a Freehold or a Leasehold tenure. What exactly does this mean, and what effect does this have on estate planning? This episode answers these two questions and uncovers one common error that unwary estate planners can fall foul of.

Perhaps the most difficult of appointments are those with a person at the very end of their life. In addition to the upsetting nature of the situation, there are the added complexities of establishing testamentary capacity, knowledge and approval of the contents of the will and a lack of any undue influence. This episodes addresses these issues and provides some guidance on several points that can assist practitioners with their task.

In this episode, we take a look at the principle of Proprietary Estoppel and how it affects estate planning. We examine the key cases that have built the framework and the three elements of assurance, reliance and detriment.

Knight v Knight, 1840, is one of the most important cases relating to trust law as it brought the concept of the three certainties of a trust into focus. This episode looks at the circumstances of the case and the court's decision making process.

This case from 1972 addressed one of the three certainties that are necessary for a valid trust - the certainty of objects. The courts looked at the wording used in the trust and in this episode, we take a look at what they considered when coming to their decision.

This episode looks at some of the main differences in instruction-taking and drafting when you have a client that does not have children as compared to a client that does have children. We take up some specific examples of how you can change the conversation to better accommodate these differences. 

As technology becomes increasingly sophisticated, should it be a worry? Consumers are more regularly going online to make their wills using websites that are getting better at interacting with the user. As professional practitioners we will rely more on technology than ever. With these trends, what does the future of our profession look like, and is there anything we should be doing now to distinguish ourselves from that which a machine is able to do?

Continuing the topic of LPAs, this episode looks at the case of The Public Guardian v RI and Others which gives us the criteria for an assessment of capacity specifically in relation to the creation of a Lasting Power of Attorney.