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There's an unavoidable trade-off between convenience and certainty. If you want to make it easier to make a will (not that it's particularly difficult now: you can buy packs that tell you how to do it for a few pounds from high street stores), you dispense with the need to have it witnessed, you allow it to be made electronically, and so on. The downside is that you then get more litigation over things like whether the testator had capacity (there aren't even any witnesses to say whether he appeared sane and sober), whether he was under undue influence or duress (again, no witnesses to say whether someone was pointing a gun at his head when he made the will), whether the will was really written (or tweeted, or whatever) by the testator at all or whether it was someone else impersonating him (forged signature, hacked account or whatever), whether what was written or tweeted was ever intended to have legal effect or whether it was just the testator "thinking out loud".

Of course, a court can rule on all these matters, but only after lots of pleadings, documentary evidence, witness testimony, expert reports legal argument, and so on, with all the immense expenditure of time and expense that involves.

As a solicitor dealing with wills and probate, I shouldn't be complaining. It's going to mean people like me are never short of work. It's just the general public that I feel sorry for, if these proposed changes are ever put into effect.

At the moment, those who want to make a will can easily do so; for the rest, well, if they don't care enough to pop into a solicitors' office or buy a will-writing pack, that's their choice, and the intestacy rules are there for them (with the Inheritance (Provision for Family and Dependants) Act as an admittedly rather expensive and cumbersome back-up mechanism when those rules don't provide equity in all the circumstances).

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