Most people who contact a solicitor about contesting a will are not being greedy. They are hurt, they are confused, and they believe something went wrong. Sometimes they are right. But there is a significant gap between believing a will is wrong and being able to prove it in court. A High Court decision from earlier this month – Woolfson v Woolfson [2026] EWHC 613 (Ch) – shows just how wide that gap can be.
Written by Yi Ling Lio, Legal Assistant
Unfairness is not a ground of challenge
English law does not require a will to be fair. A parent can leave everything to one child and nothing to the others, and as long as the will was validly made, that is their right. In Woolfson v Woolfson and others [2026] EWHC 613 (Ch), a mother (Ms Banks) had been estranged from her daughter Karen for about fifteen years. None of the wills she made during that period left Karen anything of real significance – and she made at least fourteen of them between 2006 and 2018, the majority with the help of solicitors. The final wills, signed in June 2018, appointed Karen’s brother Adrian as executor and residuary beneficiary. Karen received a legacy of £100,000. She challenged the will on almost every ground available. The court threw the whole thing out.
Testamentary capacity
For a will to be valid, the person making it must have understood what they were doing – what they owned, who might reasonably expect to benefit, and whether any condition was affecting their judgment. All four elements come from Banks v Goodfellow (1870), still applied today.
It is worth saying upfront: a dementia diagnosis does not automatically mean a person lacked capacity. That is probably the most common misconception people have when they come to us about a will. The threshold is a lower bar than people tend to assume. A person does not need to be in perfect mental health. They need to clear the threshold at the time they sign – not before, not after.
Karen argued that the sheer number of wills her mother made showed confusion, and pointed to a reference to vascular dementia on the death certificate. The court reviewed the full medical records. Ms Banks had experienced depressive episodes throughout her life, but nothing in those records suggested her capacity was ever affected. A GP and mental health specialist who assessed her in April 2018 – weeks before the will was signed – raised no concerns. A note on a death certificate written more than five years later could not overrule that.
What matters is the evidence from around the time the will was signed. That distinction trips up more claims than almost anything else.
Knowledge and approval
Even where capacity is established, the person must also have known and approved the contents of their will. But where a solicitor drafted it, the law presumes this unless something genuinely suspicious comes to light.
Ms Banks gave detailed, clear instructions to her solicitor at Irwin Mitchell. The firm’s file included affidavits confirming due execution and a photographic record of the signing. Karen had nothing concrete to set against that. The presumption held.
This is the reality of challenging a professionally drafted will: you are not just arguing with the family, you are arguing against a paper trail created by lawyers whose job was to get it right.
Undue influence
This is the ground that comes up most often in families and almost always fails. People hear “undue influence” and think it covers emotional pressure, manipulation, or a sibling being the favourite. It does not. In the context of wills, it requires proof of actual coercion – the person’s free will must have been overborne so that the document reflects someone else’s wishes entirely. The test from Re Edwards [2007] draws the line at coercion that actually overpowers the person’s own judgment. A child who visits more often, helps manage finances, or suggests what the parent should do with their estate is not exercising undue influence. Even persistent nagging is not enough. What the court needs to see is that the person was effectively stripped of their ability to decide freely – that they signed not because they wanted to but because they felt they had no choice.
Karen alleged that Adrian, together with her father and stepmother, had coerced Ms Banks over ten years. During that entire period, Ms Banks had seen numerous independent solicitors, none of whom noticed anything wrong. The court called the allegation hopeless. Sustained coercion that somehow goes undetected by multiple legal professionals across multiple visits over a decade was simply not credible.
Fraud and forgery
Karen also alleged fraud and forgery. To succeed, the court would have had to accept that multiple defendants and several independent law firms had been knowingly participating in a coordinated fraud over a period of years. Not one of those professionals had raised a concern at any point. The court called the allegation fanciful.
Historical claims
She separately relied on documents dating back to 1954 – an antenuptial contract, a trust deed from 1965, her grandfather’s will – to argue she had a long-standing entitlement to property. The court found these claims incoherent. No trust was identified with any certainty, and the financial settlement Ms Banks reached on divorce in 1981 was inconsistent with any ongoing trust interest.
Before instructing solicitors
Contesting a will is expensive, slow, and emotionally draining. It also carries real financial risk. Probate disputes are litigated in the High Court, and costs can escalate quickly. Even a relatively straightforward contested probate claim can run into tens of thousands of pounds in legal fees, and complex cases go well beyond that. If you lose, you will usually be ordered to pay the other side’s legal costs on top of your own – and even if the court orders costs to come out of the estate instead, that reduces what everyone receives, including you.
The single most important question to ask before starting is whether you have actual evidence – not suspicion, not a feeling – that something went wrong with how the will was made. A medical record from around the time of signing. A witness who saw something concerning. A concrete reason to think the person did not understand what they were doing.
If that evidence exists, get legal advice early. But if the real issue is that the will feels unfair rather than invalid, there is a different route worth knowing about. Under the Inheritance (Provision for Family and Dependants) Act 1975, children of the deceased can apply for reasonable financial provision from the estate regardless of what the will says. The test is not whether the will was properly made but whether it makes reasonable provision for the applicant. Karen did not take that route – her case was entirely about attacking the will itself – but for many people it is the more realistic claim. A solicitor can help you work out which route makes sense, or whether either does.
Woolfson is a reminder that stacking up multiple weak arguments does not make a strong case. If you are thinking about contesting a will, the best thing you can do is get honest advice early on whether the evidence is actually there.
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