You were told probate takes time. You were not told whether that is true.
A Probate Audit is an independent, written examination of how your estate administration has actually been handled: the firm's own file, compared line by line against published standards, with every finding traceable to a named document.
One report. £299, fixed. No tiers, no hourly rates, no outcome promises.
Two situations bring people to us.
You are the executor, and you are the one being chased.
The family asks you what is happening, and you have no answer, because the firm has not given you one. An independent audit turns that pressure into a shared, factual document: instead of defending the delay, you commission an examination of it. It is the difference between an argument and an answer.
You are a beneficiary, and the estate has gone quiet.
You are waiting on money or property, updates have dried up, and you are not even the firm's client. Depending on who regulates the firm, the law and the complaints schemes still give you real routes, and an audit sets out, with sources, which ones exist in your case.
Before we test anything, we establish who regulates your firm.
Solicitors answer to the Solicitors Regulation Authority, and a long list of legal duties and published standards binds them. Many estates are administered by firms that are not solicitors at all, and most of that list simply does not apply to them. An audit that holds a firm to rules that do not bind it collapses the moment the firm replies. So every Probate Audit starts by answering one question from the file itself: what actually binds this firm? Every test that follows is chosen accordingly, and the tests that do not apply are listed in the report, marked as not applying, so you can see the fairness as well as the findings.
Every test tells you two things, in words anyone can read.
Whose standard were we checking against?
The law, or the rules of the firm's own regulator, requires this. The firm has no choice about it.
Published guidance from professional bodies such as the Law Society. Falling short is not breaking the law, but it is below the bar the profession sets itself.
Where no law and no published guidance sets a figure, we use our own working measure, we say so, and we never treat it as a rule.
What did we find?
We checked, and the firm met the standard. A fair report shows what a firm got right as clearly as what it got wrong, and ours do.
The firm fell short of the standard, and it is worth raising with them.
The firm fell short in a way that has consequences for the estate, or for the people waiting on it.
The standards are already published. Most people have never been shown them.
Files must not just sit there.
The Law Society's Lexcel standard requires practices to check their files regularly for inactivity, and its guidance accepts an inactive file only where there is a valid reason. A file that went quiet for months, with no reason recorded, has a question to answer.
"We were waiting for HMRC" is not the end of the answer.
The Legal Ombudsman does not blame firms for delays they did not cause. But the firm must still explain the delay, estimate its length, keep you updated, and get on with everything it can progress. The question is never only how long it took; it is what the firm did while you waited.
Reasonable requests deserve reasonable responses.
The Legal Ombudsman's own test for probate service is reasonable responses to reasonable requests in a reasonable time. Your file either evidences that, or it does not.
We sell the report, and nothing else.
Probate Audit does not administer estates, does not take referral fees, and does not name or endorse firms in its reports. We are not a firm of solicitors and we do not give legal advice: the report describes what the documents show, lists the routes that exist in your situation, and leaves every decision with you. If anyone, including the firm we audited, shows us a factual error, we correct the report and reissue it without charge. A report you can check is the entire product.