Solicitor's fees for dealing with estate

O

opusirl

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Just approached a solicitor to help with sorting out my late Mother's estate. The will is straight forward (so they told me) but before I go ahead with anything thought I'd just check on the costs. The rates I was quoted are as follows:

First £10,000 - 3.5%
Next £10,000 - 3.0%
Balance - 2.0%

Plus VAT @ 21% plus expenses.

The pound signs are what was in the quote so I'll check if they really mean € or not.

Would anyone know if this is a reasonable fee or not?
 
Why not get quotes from 1 or 2 other solicitors? I'd look for fixed price quotes, rather than percentage-based.
 
A starting point for flat fee solicitors might be our old friend Dermot Deane - although given that he's regularly described as being, how shall I put it, brusque in manner, he might not be the ideal person to deal with the recently bereaved.....
 
I would have expected a fixed price quote too. I would have thought it was based on the amount of work involved for the solicitor and not on the value of the estate.

z
 
It is common practice to be quoted %rates and it is unlikely that you would get a fixed price quote. Probate can often be difficult to sort out unless the estate consists simply of a house and a few bank accounts.
 
I asked around some other solicitors and indeed the % rate seems to be the way they do things in this case.
 
Did you ask them how they work, or did you tell them how you expect them to work? They are going to keep doing as suits them, unless you tell them differently.
 
Good for you, rainy.

Estate agents quite rightly get a lot of hammer here and elsewhere for % based fees on house sales. Even they have started to respond to demands by sellers for reductions.

Solicitors gain in exactly the same way from the explosion in house prices. It's no more work for them sorting out probate on a will which includes a €500k house in 2004 than it was when such a house was worth £75k in 1994. But just think of all the lovely extra fees.

Has anybody out there ever got a good deal?
 
probate costs

First £10,000 - 3.5%
Next £10,000 - 3.0%
Balance - 2.0%

Plus VAT @ 21% plus expenses.

This relates to an old "scale" charge from the late 1970s or early 80s. The Law Society (in the pre Competition Act era) carried out a study and found large disparities in charges on administration of estates, from less than 1% to over 8%. This scale of charges was really only the Law Society's best effort at giving a formula which seemed to represent the average amount being charged, and was never intended as more than a rough guideline. Today, many firms continue to use this as a rough guide, but it is (in my view) outmoded.

The legal costs involved in administering even an apparently simple estate can still vary widely, and I suppose a percentage charge does at least have the virtue of certainty, but even still, it would be more normal (I would have thought) to pay less than 2% at least on the real property portion of an estate. Certainly many rural practices, even those still using a percentage charge, would be more likely to charge 1% on, say, a farm, perhaps 1.5% on a house.
 
Re: probate costs

Firstly, sorry for your trouble, as they say...
Secondly, ditto to all the above.

11 years ago, my old Dad (R.I.P.) left his estate in the hands of the 'Trust' services of a major bank in/(of?) Ireland ;) , who promptly and 'executorially' farmed the legal work out to one of 'their' solicitors...

It was fully 18 months before (s)he sorted out a perfectly straightforward estate, despite the fact that my Dad (an old-style 'Life Insurance man') had left absolutely every single scrap of relevant paper in place and up-to-date...

We found out subsequently that the scavengers made about €10K on this 'piece-of-piss' job.
(I remember that it used to cost me a day's wages (back then) every time we rang them or they sent us a poxy letter telling us how soon they 'hoped to complete' the business...)

Shop around. 'Big time', as my kids say. At a time of loss, the last thing you need is to get ripped off, which — hypothetically, and without prejudice — is what this smacks of...
 
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