Estate Administration

As a death lawyer, I talk a lot about death and loss and entirely unsurprisingly, grief. When I first started my estate planning practice, I was very intentional about focusing on living people. Partly because I didn’t want to bite off more than I could chew and partly because I, entirely misguidedly, thought it would help me avoid conversations with grieving people. How wrong I was! Grieving people are everywhere, not just sitting across from

Let me paint you a picture. You’re sitting minding your own business doing a crossword puzzle (or whatever it is you do when you’re minding your own business) on a Saturday afternoon, when the phone rings. It’s your Auntie Doris, calling to say she hopes you don’t mind, but she’s popped you down as the executor in her will, because you’re more organised than the other nieces and nephews and she knows you’ll do a

There’s a lot of chatter in the media around a new Draft Taxation Determination from the Australian Taxation Office (ATO) that clarifies how the main residence capital gains tax (CGT) exemption applies to inherited properties. Yes, the ATO has changed how it reads your will, but will it affect you? Maybe. Maybe not. On the surface, there’s no new tax and no new legislation. Just a draft ruling that quietly reinterprets a rule. In practice,

According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) in 2023, 25% of households included stepchildren. While I often point out that children are children in the eyes of succession law (it doesn’t matter which partnership they come from) there’s no escaping that blended families bring a level of complexity to estate planning that can have a bigger impact than many people anticipate. A will dictates how your assets (property, savings, superannuation) are shared after you’re

It doesn’t matter if you’ve called your ChatGPT account Chad, Chip, or Claude (or some other weird anthropomorphism), it’s not a real person. It doesn’t know you. It doesn’t understand your family. It cannot judge nuance. And it absolutely cannot give legal advice tailored to your personal circumstances. It produces words based on prompts, which is very different from producing a legally effective estate plan or legal advice. Being informed is wonderful. I fully support

Gone are the days of romance scammers asking for a bank transfer to cover the cost of an airfare, skimming money off your credit card for an ’emergency’, or requesting gift cards be sent in the mail. Well, those days are not gone, gone but things in scamland have shifted up a notch. Scammers are now playing the long game; building trust over months or years and positioning themselves to benefit from wills and estates,