My DF's parents both passed away around a year ago, within a few weeks of each other.
Their estate will be worth quite a significant amount - two properties and cash. I'm not sure exactly how much, but at least in the low seven figures. The only beneficiaries in the will are my DF and my brother, so nothing complicated there.
There is a solicitor dealing with the probate, but they are apparently a poor communicator and DP isn't the best at dealing with these things. He still works in a high-level executive position, and while he wasn't affected by his parents' death, he's had a stressful 12 months with work, and my DM being quite seriously ill.
Probably complicating things is the fact that DF had an extremely difficult relationship with his parents, with virtually zero contact for the last 20+ years and only very sporadic prior to that. They were incredibly difficult and unpleasant people and he finds talking about them, even to us, quite hard.
This money should be going towards his upcoming retirement; DM is concerned that something has gone wrong with the process and he's not telling her to keep her from the stress.
I have no experience of probate (and Google is giving me all kinds of answers) but this does feel like a long time...brother and I are currently contemplating raising it with him, but knowing how difficult he finds these kind of conversations, we don't want to stress him out needlessly if this is actually quite normal.
I'm going to post in legal for some legal advice, but for here, given that it's been over a year, would it be unreasonable of us to have a bit of a crisis meeting with DF to find out what's going on, and if we can help?