How long should it take to sort out a (fairly) simple will?

[ThriceWoe]

Bit of a left-fielder, this but if some legally-minded Mumsnetter could offer a view, I'd be very interested. My Dad died the Christmas before last - ie 2007. The solicitor sorting out the will has been agonisingly slow and in fact still hasn't given us the final word that it's all satisfactorily tied up (and hasn't sent a bill - though maybe that's good!). It was a really simple estate as Dad had one solitary bank account (shared with my Mum), a couple of insurance policies, and that's it. Only slightly complicated thing is a nil-rate-band trust, so their house had to be transferred into different ownership, but the value of his estate was vastly below the threshold, and I'd have thought that was a really commonplace thing to deal with nowadays. Is a year a reasonable time-scale for something like this to be sorted? My instinct says no, but I'm not an expert.

I'd have expected it sorted within 3 mths tbh

I recently executed an estate and it took a month. How long did it take for probate to be approved though - sometimes the courts delay things.

Sorry about your dad.

Oh and the land registry normally takes three weeks to transfer title deeds these days IIRC so pretty crappy service I'd say!

It can take ages. It may not the solicitor holding things up, but the people he is waiting for to act on his instructions.

DH is a solicitor specialising in this area of law. I know some of his estates can ake a good while to sort out.

However yours seems to have been going on a very long tim, and the time scale does see too extreme, especially if a simple probate.

Have you spoken to the solicitor and asked him/her why it is taking so long and what the hold up is?

Thanks all of you. Well, I've kept emailing him and asking for news of progress - he sometimes takes ages to reply and then promises things will be sorted in a couple of weeks...then lapses into total silence again. It really is a simple estate, IMHO. As I say, there was practically nothing to do except the trust thing - I closed the back account and notified the insurers, etc, etc. One of the hold-ups is due to the fact that, when the same solicitor drew up the nil-rate-band thing a couple of years ago, the Land Registry entry was wrongly recorded. This didn't come to light at all until after Dad died and the solicitor revealed it! They'd assured us at the time that everything was fine.

bank account, I mean!

I have to say that I've been pretty unhappy with this guy for ages, because when my parents were thinking about having the trust drawn up, he delayed things for ages, insisting that the law was about to change and it was best to hang on until we knew what was happening. He promised to keep us informed, but never did. In the end I asked another solicitor for some informal advice and they said 'but all the legislation has been known about for ages - you can find it all on the government's own website!' When I asked the first guy why he didn't seem to know about this, he just shrugged it off. Not impressed. Tbh we should have gone to another solicitor at that point.

The law did change about a year ago on power of attorney. He does sound like a git but you are sort of tied to him now

Make sure he's not down as your mums executor!