You lived with someone for years, shared a home, built businesses together, and treated everything as ‘ours’. Then your partner dies, and the will leaves most of it to someone else. You feel certain a share is yours, maybe even that you own part of the property outright.
Before you act on that, it helps to understand the difference between two cases people tend to confuse. One is saying the will itself was no good: that it was forged, or made under pressure, or made by someone who lacked the capacity to make it.
The other is accepting the will but saying it should not have the last word, either because you already own part of what it gives away, or because it failed to provide for you and the law says it should have. Matyas v Daniel [2026] EWHC 1368 is the second kind, and a hard lesson in what that kind of claim can cost when the evidence is thin.
A man spent nine years entangled in litigation over his late partner’s estate. He lost on every point. An estate once worth more than a million pounds was almost entirely consumed by costs, and he came out of it owing around £440,000, the bulk of that costs orders made against him.
What the case was about
Chris Liu was a London fashion designer who was born in China. He died in April 2017, aged 47. Tibor Matyas said the two of them had been life and business partners for years, living and working as a single unit where money and property were shared equally, whatever name happened to be on the paperwork.
Chris’s will left two London flats, both in his sole name, to his brother and parents. Mr Matyas was given a quarter share of one of them. A third flat, held in joint names, passed to Mr Matyas automatically on Chris’s death. Mr Matyas then brought two claims against the estate. First, that he owned half of each of the two flats in Chris’s sole name, because the two of them had always understood everything to be shared. Second, that the will failed to provide for him properly under the Inheritance (Provision for Family and Dependants) Act 1975, and that he should be allowed to bring that claim years late.
Both failed.
Can an unmarried partner claim a share of property in the other’s name?
If a property is in one person’s sole name, the law starts from the position that that person owns it. If you say it should be split differently, the burden is on you to prove it. You need to show the two of you shared an intention that you would have a stake in it, and that you then acted to your own detriment in reliance on that shared intention. Believing you were a couple who pooled everything does not get you there on its own.
The documents did not back Mr Matyas up. He said the flats had been paid for out of joint business income, including a consultancy with a Chinese fashion house worth £300,000 a year. There was no trace of that consultancy anywhere: no contract, no invoices, no emails, nothing. The judge concluded it most likely never existed. The money for the flats had come out of Chris’s own accounts, topped up by his family in China. Mr Matyas had paid in nothing.
There was also a document that cut against him. He had signed a transfer confirming that one of the flats should always have been Chris’s alone, and that he had no interest in it. Then he spent years arguing the opposite. The judge said that document could not be wished away. He also noted that Mr Matyas had resisted signing it at the time, and had taken care to check that the change would not affect his own first-time buyer status.
The one flat he genuinely did co-own made the same point from the other direction. That flat was bought in both names, with a joint account set up to run it, and Mr Matyas had read the paperwork closely. This was not a couple who ignored the legal paperwork. When they meant to own something together, they put both names on it.
The 1975 Act claim, and why it failed
The 1975 Act lets certain people, a cohabiting partner among them, ask the court to provide for them where a will did not. Mr Matyas’s claim failed for three separate reasons, any one of which would have sunk it.
The first is domicile. The Act only applies where the person who died was domiciled in England and Wales. Chris kept close ties to both China and New Zealand throughout his life. He described himself as ‘from China’, sent money there, helped his father buy a property there, renewed his New Zealand passport, and on one company filing gave his nationality as New Zealander. Even when he needed cancer treatment, he chose a clinic in Germany rather than the NHS. In law, the country you’re born into stays your home unless you can show you’ve genuinely settled somewhere else for good. Nothing here showed Chris had settled in England.
The second is whether they lived as a married couple. To claim as a partner, you have to show you lived together as a married couple for the whole two years before the death, and that the relationship was presented openly. But Chris described Mr Matyas as his “business partner” to his family and his solicitors, said he was single when giving instructions for his will, and kept the relationship from his family altogether. Council tax records and his driving licence had the two of them living at separate addresses.
The third is reasonable provision. Even setting the first two points aside, the will had in fact provided for Mr Matyas reasonably. Matyas inherited roughly 20 per cent of an estate worth over a million pounds. He was 39 when Chris died, in good health, and able to earn across technology, fashion, sales and management and could therefore support himself. What put him in financial trouble was not the will but the case he chose to run.
On top of those three, there was a further hurdle. A 1975 Act claim normally has to be brought within six months of the grant of representation, and Mr Matyas was years out of time, so he needed the court’s permission to proceed at all. The judge refused it, and said he would have refused even if the claim had been a good one, because of the way Mr Matyas had conducted himself over the preceding nine years.
What a weak claim can cost
In the years between Chris’s death and his own claim, the court found, Mr Matyas dragged out the administration of the estate, would not set out his claim when asked again and again, and at one point served an earlier version of it on relatives in China rather than on the administrator, then failed to take the steps he had been told were needed to serve it there properly.
By the end, costs had swallowed almost all of a seven-figure estate. There were eight separate costs orders against Mr Matyas. The relatives who should have inherited stayed out of the final hearing because the litigation had drained what they had. Mr Matyas walked away owing around £440,000.
Real claims by partners and others do succeed, and the 1975 Act exists precisely because some wills leave dependants with nothing. But bringing a claim is not free of risk: lose, and you can come away with far less than you started with.
And Mr Matyas was not acting in bad faith. The judge accepted he probably did see the relationship as a marriage in all but name. The difficulty was that believing it did not make it provable. Courts look at what was written and done at the time, and on that record his case was not made out.
If you are thinking about claiming against an estate
- The documents matter more than the feeling. Look at the title, anything you signed, the bank records. If the paperwork cuts against your account, that is the real case you have to win, and it is harder than most people expect.
- Be honest with yourself about what you can actually show. A real financial contribution, a written agreement, an understanding recorded at the time. Those carry weight. “We treated everything as ours” does not.
- Get advice on the merits early, before positions harden and costs climb. Sometimes the most useful thing a solicitor can tell you is that a claim is not worth bringing.
- There is a time limit, and it is short. A 1975 Act claim normally has to be brought within six months of the grant of representation. Going late needs the court’s permission, which is never guaranteed, and is harder still if you caused the delay.
- Remember that costs follow the result. Lose, and you will usually pay the other side’s costs as well as your own. In a fight over an estate, that can leave very little for anyone, yourself included.
In summary
Challenging how a will was made is one thing. Claiming against an estate, on the basis that you already own part of it or that it owes you provision, is another, and Matyas v Daniel shows how badly that second kind of claim can go when there is little to back it up. Feeling certain is not the same as being able to prove it, and the difference can cost you everything you were fighting for and more. Have someone test the evidence honestly before you commit, not once you are already in.
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