A new will-writing organisation is lobbying the Legal Services Board for will writing to become a regulated activity and, if successful, will apply to become a will-writing regulator.

The company behind the Fellowship of Professional Willwriters and Probate Practitioners (FPWPP), which launched this week, has previously fallen foul of the Solicitors Regulation Authority and has been criticised in the High Court.

The FPWPP says that it is a not-for-profit professional representative body with independent regulatory and academic boards, and has created accredited qualifications in conjunction with awarding body Edexcel. It also has a compensation fund.

The FPWPP was created by Estate Protection Services (EPS), a Midlands-based will writing and probate company that until September 2008 traded under the name Solicitors Probate Services (SPS).

In June 2008, the SRA banned SPS from carrying out probate work after it intervened in the practice of Stephen Share, an SPS director who practised as a solicitor through SPS, allegedly in breach of solicitors’ rules, because SPS was not a recognised body for probate purposes.

Dismissing Share’s High Court appeal against the intervention in July 2008, Justice Patten, presiding, said in his judgment that ‘the business of SPS is simply a moneymaking exercise in which the clients’ interests are regarded as anything but paramount’, and that ‘the sales methods [of SPS] are calculated to prey on their [clients’] fears’.

A spokeswoman for EPS said that SPS ‘fell foul to a rogue willwriter’. The High Court ruled that solicitors’ rules did not permit Share ‘to operate SPS as a separate business from his practice, acting as executors, drafting wills or making applications for probate’. The spokeswoman said that ‘the other company stakeholders… were unaware of the solicitor’s actions [and] were left to pick up the pieces’.

Birmingham and Midlands newspaper the Sunday Mercury alleged in August 2008 that an SPS consultant quoted an undercover reporter £2,100 for the firm to be named as executor of a will, despite the existence of the probate ban.

Emma Hodges, managing director of EPS, said that EPS set up the not-for-profit FPWPP ‘in order to ensure that our members are fully qualified to national standards and regulated by an independent regulatory board backed by a compensation fund for consumer protection’.

Text on the EPS website reads: ‘Unlike other Willwriting companies, Estate Protection Services are proud to say that all our Will Consultants have undergone rigorous examinations and are individually regulated by the Fellowship of Professional Willwriters and Probate Practitioners. The FPWPP are a totally independent organisation that set the standards that EPS work to.’

Text on the FPWPP website says that its boards ‘operate entirely independently… to any other organisation including Estate Protection Services’.

Stephen Share will appear before the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal on 24 November. He could not be reached for his response.

EPS did not provide a comment on Justice Patten’s remarks or the reports in the Sunday Mercury.