1. The Perception: solicitors do wills at little or no cost because they expect to make money when you die. The Reality: This may have been true in the past - particularly when law firms tended to pass as multi-generational family businesses. I have been making wills for 25+ years and hardly anybody has died on me. My probate practice is almost entirely from wills made by solicitors long gone, and there was no 'crock of gold' for them in their will safe -because solicitors practices do not command a big price (unlike, say ,accountancy practices which have steady recurring revenue).
I and most solicitors continue to prepare wills at a financial loss, because there is a public perception that a will should cost very little and it is very hard to either refuse the work or to charge properly for it without giving offence. I have friends in the UK, married with no children, who have paid £900 for a pair of wills. My normal charge varies from zero to €200 including VAT.
2. The Perception: solicitors like making money on search fees. The Reality: When a solicitor is trying to locate a missing will, he\she will write to maybe 20 firms. 19 out of 20 will conduct a search and then reply "no will here". 1 out of 20 will reply "yes we have a will; Here is our invoice for €100+VAT search and retrieval". If anybody thinks that getting a search fee for one in every twenty searches is a profitable business model, I have a bridge I can sell you.
3. The Perception ; Solicitors love disputes about wills. The Reality: We like some disputes - but they are rare. Mostly, they are more trouble than they are worth. We hate it when the drafting of the will is questioned. We hate it when it is suggested that we didn't take proper instruction from the deceased. All in all, estate disputes are fraught with professional risk. What we really actually like: nice straightforward probate files, where the deceased's affairs are in order, where there is plenty of cash and ideally just one or two beneficiaries (if there are ten beneficiaries of the residue, you can be nearly guaranteed that one of them will complain about your fees or your service; with just one or two, you can make sure everyone is happy and shake hands on your fee)
4. The Perception An obligatory register of wills would solve a lot of problems in a cost effective manner. The Reality: Most wills are safely stored and in due course safely processed. For the one in 100 wills (at a guess) that would benefit from a compulsory register, there are 99 wills that have just had a needless registration cost imposed. Even at €60 per registration, most people will change wills three, four, five times in their life -so call it €250 per estate. That's maybe €250 x 99 = €25,000 in admin cost added to the system to safeguard the 1 will in 100 that goes astray. Unless of course you think that a solicitor should do this for free (but even then there will be some sort of registration fees payable). The second issue is that some people, often for good reason, do not want it to be known that they have made a will. Compulsory registration will create an obstacle for such clients.
The legal profession has debated this issue a number of times. There is no consensus and no clearly right answer. The availability of a public wills register is probably a good idea. The notion that it should be compulsory is probably not. The idea that the legal profession have created the current system out of cynical self interest is, however, nonsense.