Introduction
| Author | James Normington |
| Pages | 23-24 |
Introduction
The legal system in England and Wales and the concepts of probate have
evolved throughout the centuries, yet the underlying concepts and
principles would still be familiar to Charles Dickens, Mr Jaggers1 and the
eighteenth-century jurist, Sir William Blackstone.2 The trust and equity
concepts and division of assets between beneficiaries have evolved down
the centuries and now we have witnessed a sea change in the assets
themselves. The Haversham estate of Dickens’ Great Expectations required
the sale of a brewery, several houses and a substantial number of stocks,
bonds and monetary instruments. As we progress through the twenty-first
century an estate may not contain any real assets, and we are approaching
a time when all parts of the probate process may be dealt with
electronically, including the client interactions, the filing of court
documents, the grant of probate and the distributions. As reported by the
BBC, during the COVID-19 pandemic we saw a dramatic increase in the
use of video conferencing technology in courts of over 500% compared to
the previous 12 months. Even contentious probate applications and trials
have been dealt with remotely in relation to the hearing of evidence and
submissions.3
For the most part, and to a greater or lesser extent, estates throughout
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries mirrored the contents of the
Haversham estate. Mr Jaggers and his hard-working clerk, Mr Wemmick,
would have had little issue dealing with an estate in the mid-twentieth
century as it was largely similar to an estate in the mid-nineteenth century.
The assets may have increased in value over time, but the basics remained
the same. It was still a case of dealing with real property such as houses,
stocks, bonds, shares, bank accounts and the deceased’s business affairs,
as well as the important matters of dealing with the deceased’s final wishes.
In the twenty-first century, the expansion of our individual lives into the
digital space has led to each of us creating a digital footprint. Arguably,
for some the footprint is small, but for some clients it verges on a Yeti- or
Sasquatch-sized digital footprint. That digital footprint has in most cases
expanded to include assets or quasi-assets that poor old Jaggers could only
1 Charles Dickens, Great Expectations (1861).
2 Blackstone was a barrister, jurist and judge. He was called by Middle Temple and
authored numerous legal works, including the Commentaries on the Laws of England
(Clarendon Press, 1765), which was one of the best sellers of its day.
3 ‘Remote hearings for family courts “horribly cruel”’, BBC News, 4 June 2020,
www.bbc.co.uk/news.
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