Exizent: Overcoming delays in the probate process
It’s not ‘new news’ that the probate registry took a hit as a result of the COVID pandemic in 2020. These pressures caused huge delays in the process that put grieving notifiers under further stress as they waited for permission to bring their loved one’s estate to a close.
Yet, receiving a grant of probate is just one of the steps notifiers must go through on the journey to closing their loved one’s case – a step that has been enhanced in recent months as the backlog of applications has been addressed. In fact, our recent research, which forms the basis of the 2022 Bereavement Index report, implies that the registry shouldn’t be solely to blame for the lengthy processes notifiers have to go through following the loss of a loved one – which in 10% of cases take over a year to complete.
Bereavement Index research found that 83% of legal professionals find the estate administration process to be ‘slow and complicated’ in 2022 and, rather than blame the registry for this, these professionals place much of the blame on financial institutions. In legal services’ top main causes of delays in estate administration, awaiting responses from institutions, institutions being slow to respond and institutions being unable to provide all the information the legal services need to progress a case, ranked positions 1, 2 and 5 respectively. General administration and drafting legal documentation took spots 3 and 4.
While communications with financial institutions appear a bugbear for legal services, legal services should possibly look to their own methods of communications before pointing the finger. Our research found that law firms still rely vastly on physical letters and manual processes to take a probate case through its lifecycle, with findings reporting that 4 out of 5 professionals do not have dedicated software for managing their cases. This means that the majority of firms do not have an organised set up for communicating with institutions and instead rely on ad hoc email trails, letters and phone conversations that aren’t always safely documented. With an array of communications in a variety of forms, legal services themselves are putting key data at risk of loss or breach which has the potential to delay cases.
What’s more, with over two thirds (73%) of firms admitting to sending between 10-50 letters per probate case – and a further 20% sending over 50 – legal professionals should look to join forces with financial institutions to bring more technology to the forefront of their joint communications, where possible, to speed up the wait times and overcome a key factor causing delays.
Communications, however, weren’t the only factor found to add significant time onto case resolution. General administration related to probate cases and drafting legal documentation were also high up the list for legal services, which relate to tasks that include reporting on case details, filling in court and IHT forms and completing estate accounts – all lengthy processes with lots of moving parts. But it doesn’t have to be this difficult.
Dedicated probate software has been developed to speed up these processes for legal professionals and minimise the potential for the case delays often caused by them. While in the past, lawyers were required to individually input all case details, manually complete every required IHT form, and complete the complex calculations that come with estate accounts themselves, technology has now been developed to do all of these tasks and more.
Exizent software now let’s you input all the information about a case once, select all the forms this information needs to be replicated into, and automate the completion of these forms to overcome what was once an error-prone and arduous task. And, since September, it now allows you to complete your estate accounts, effortlessly, at the click of a button (and designed to STEP standards!)
This year, two thirds of legal professionals admitted that more than 25% of probate cases are delayed, a number that has doubled year-on year. With the advanced case management solutions available today, isn’t it time lawyers took responsibility for delays in the bereavement process that they can control which cause notifiers unnecessary stress at the time when they truly need it the least.
Find out more about this software – visit our website.
