This week, we’re moving deeper into the process, focussing on two more problems practitioners raised again and again:

→the administrative hell of asset-holder forms, and
→the chaos of managing dozens (or hundreds) of open matters at once.

Where pressure, time, and responsibility collide to create bottlenecks, we’ve consulted with practitioners to develop tools with the capacity to deliver a serious difference.

And thanks to the lawyers and clerks on Vale’s Expert Advisory Panel, we’ve been able to build solutions grounded in the way legal work is actually done.

300 Hand-Written Pieces of Paper
Pre-Filled Forms

Ask any probate clerk what they dislike most about their job.

The answer is almost universal:
Forms.
Forms.
Forms.

Every bank, every super fund, every share registry in Australia has its own deceased-estate forms.

They all ask for the same twenty or so pieces of information—but with different layouts, different requirements, and different rejection triggers.

A signature slightly outside the box? Rejected.

Ticked the wrong version of a form? Rejected.

Wrong date format? Rejected.

There’s a real emotional toll here. Lawyers feel trapped in a system that punishes trivial deviations in equal measure. Huge amounts of labour too often get torpedoed by systems that feel arbitrarily taxing.

When we asked lawyers and clerks across our advisory panel to rate this pain on a ten-point scale, the average response was 8.7.

That’s why we’ve worked with so many clerks. Senior lawyers have given us much insight, but clerks have a unique understanding of the administrative weight of this work.

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Enter Tracey Justin: 30 Years, 28,000 Forms.

Over three decades across NSW and Victoria, Tracey has run hundreds of estate files a year. I estimate she’s completed 28,000 asset-holder forms. If each form takes just six minutes, this amounts to an entire year of her life entering the same information over and over again.

Clerks like Tracey experience the work from a unique angle. They know which forms stall for weeks, they know which banks demand certified copies, they know which registries reject signatures for touching the line, and which insist on older versions of forms that no longer exist online. Lawyers like Tracey have had decades to internalise information that most lawyers are manually googling day after day. We thought that the cognitive load and labour required to store or look up all this information should be made accessible to all practitioners in one place.

Tracey helped us understand not just the paperwork, but the flow of data inside a law firm:

how information enters, where it’s duplicated, where errors arise, where juniors get stuck, and where hours vanish.

With her guidance, we gathered every asset-holder form we could find from banks, super funds, share registries, platforms—you name it. We maintain a national database of these forms—a database built into Vale and available to all users. We organised them, coded their structure, and linked them to the matter data Vale already extracts.

The result is Pre-Filled Forms:

• Vale identifies which forms each estate actually needs

• It pre-populates them instantly with the correct matter data

• It guides the user through institution-specific requirements

What used to take hours now takes seconds. What consumed months of a practitioner’s career now takes days.

When Tracey saw the early prototype, she said: “Tom, people are going to want this!”

Clerks know this work most intimately and it makes sense that they’re best-placed to understand the value on offer in a feature like Pre-Filled Forms. Tracey’s confidence in what we showed her gave us the confidence to build the system end-to-end.

If you’re not sure just how much of a difference Pre-Filled Forms will make, ask your clerks!

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Managing Hundreds of Matters with Today/Upcoming

If forms are an administrative nightmare, then matter management is a mental one. This is what Today/Upcoming is tailored to tackle.

Every practitioner we’ve interviewed described some variation on the same scene: hundreds of open files, each at different stages, each requiring a different set of actions, each dependent on external timelines that don’t align, and with limited visibility between practitioners and clerks’ workflows.

Many lawyers still run practices predominantly on paper.

Some have expensive practice-management software with built-in task features that don’t cut the mustard.

Some rely on Outlook reminders, written lists, or memory alone.

Some are lucky enough to have clerks who hold the entire system together by force of will.

Everyone, in their own way, is improvising.

I didn’t know this when I started working for my Dad at O’Neill Solicitors, and was baffled by the administrative nightmare gluing probate practice together. What I’d encountered at O’Neills was one of thousands of systems resourcefully assembled to keep matters moving.

This is what a technologically under-served space looks like:

The workflow = the physical location of the file.

If the file is with you, you’re working on it.

If you hand it to someone else, you’ve passed the baton.

If it’s on the floor in the corner, it is scheduled for tomorrow.

Files in cabinets? Archived or waiting.

Piles on the left side of the partner’s office are tomorrow’s priorities.

Piles on the right: super-urgent.

The desk pile: do it now.

You don’t check a dashboard to understand the practice. You walk the office and look at where the files are breathing. These systems are powered by instinct, memory, and constant micro-judgments. Most juniors would have been told not to change a thing. Dad let me try.

At O’Neills, we split the tech stack into functional blocks: LEAP for trust accounting Xero for office accounting, SharePoint for documents, and Notion to host live dashboards, daily priorities, and task visibility across the team.

We could finally see, at a glance, who was working on what and where each matter stood. When COVID hit, we were ready to go remote while so many others were playing catch-up.

All these years, and thousands of hours of conversations about firm operations later, I get it: probate lawyers do not think in tasks. They think in matters.

Practice-management tools were interrupting the visual workflow that lawyers were used to, forcing them into task lists they’d never really wanted. This was the seed that grew into Vale’s Today/Upcoming feature, validated along the way by lawyers like Dan O’Connor.

Dan is a Partner at Bell Legal Group on the Gold Coast, and became an extremely valuable person to bounce our feature ideas off. When I showed him Today/Upcoming he laughed and pretty much told us that this is what he’s already doing in the calendar feature of his practice management software.

Dan had effectively re-invented the paper-pile system using the tools available, recreating the floor workflow the way so many lawyers are trying to do.

But in reclaiming their office space and digitising workflows, lawyers like Dan were still relying on tools that weren’t designed for matter management. A calendar is for appointments and deadlines, not for deciding which file deserves your attention today. Dan was shoe-horning a complex workflow into a tool that simply wasn’t built for it. He’d never had software that understood the problem deeply enough to solve it elegantly. That’s the gap Vale stepped into.

Discussions with Dan galvanised our conception of what Today/Upcoming is all about. So much of our efforts to streamline estate administration centre around reducing double-handing, human-error and cognitive load.

The process as a whole can’t just deliver clarity and efficiency in each isolated step—it has to culminate in an experience that helps lawyers zoom and and see the forest for the trees, and readjust priorities, before zooming back in on the detailed legal work.

In that sense, Today/Upcoming is where the compass needle stops spinning, and points lawyers directly where they need to go. Only, unlike a compass, Today/Upcoming responds to human judgement. You tell that compass which matters need your attention, just like Dan was already doing in his calendar. Only this time, all in one place, each matter contains within in a logical, step-by-step process informed by lawyers like Dan’s pre-existing workflows.

Move a matter into Today → it’s on your desk.
Move it into Tomorrow → it’s queued for the morning.
Move it into next Thursday → it disappears until Thursday.
Leave it in Anytime → it’s off your mind entirely.

Each matter carries its own date and its own “next step.”

The system reveals what needs attention today, hides what doesn’t, and mirrors the mental model lawyers have always used.

We’re not asking lawyers to change how they work. We just talked to lawyers like Dan, and found a way to give them their floor back that doesn’t force them to open and close 100 tabs to stay on track.

Today/Upcoming doesn’t ‘solve’ a problem as much as it merely organises solutions already being used to manage matters. It’s about ensuring that your estate administration process culminates in simple, resolute continuity, without imposing new systems, new rules, or deviating from what already works for lawyers.

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Closing the Loop

As technology changes everything around us, estate administration has felt stuck.

Practitioners tell us in detail about lag, double-handing, institutional aches, and the burden of being hamstrung across digital and physical files. Difficulties in establishing office processes that don’t trade digitising for visibility crop up all over the country, with a huge variety of band-aid solutions improvised by firms keen to just keep the ball rolling.

In our research for the Australian Probate Report 2025, we found that 60.4% of surveyed probate practitioners reported using AI tools in the past 12 months, with most firms prioritising investment to streamline operations. Practitioners and clerks like like Michael O’Neill, Tracey Justin, and Dan O’Connor show us not only the value in tech curiosity, but demonstrate just how much of the work has already been done for us. But while years of trial and error, adaptation, and knowledge acquisition are there for technology providers to investigate, they’re going strangely ignored.

Working directly with the profession has given us the capacity to deliver a suite of tools that responds directly to their needs. It’s that simple. Collaboration is where value begets value.

The five features we’ve run through in last week’s and today’s newsletters are designed to help practitioners keep the wheels of succession turning. Each feature responds to issues faced by lawyers on the ground by harnessing their wisdom and modernising solutions improvised from firm to firm.

→ AI Matter Creation to eliminate double data-entry;
→ 2-Click Discovery to save time searching for estate assets;
→ Follow-Ups & Next Steps to reduce the mental load;
→ Pre-Filled Forms to save your hand from repetitive strain injury; and
→ Today/Upcoming to help you prioritise.

Consider the above features Vale’s starting point: a platform designed for wills and estates lawyers to deliver access, transparency, efficiency, and forethought to those whose time is better spent on the just, quick, and cheap delivery of legal services.

Join the waitlist before midnight this Sunday (16 November) and you’ll have a chance to use the product for free for the rest of the year. If you or your firm would like to become part of the conversation that is shaping the development of modern tools and technology for estate administration, joining the waitlist also offers access to our Partnership Program.

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Tom O’Neill | Vale.legal | The Australian Probate Report 2025 | Contact | Archive

This week, we’re lifting the hood on how that collaboration has taken shape in three core features: AI Matter Creation, 2-Click Discovery, and Follow-Ups & Next Steps.

Probate is complex, nuanced, and increasingly demanding. Our research, summarised below, showed that most lawyers share similar frustrations: double-handling client data, repetitive estate discovery, and the constant effort of tracking institutional correspondence and matter progression.

1. Starting an Estate Administration Matter

The first challenge comes right at the beginning, when the matter is created.

For every estate, the same names and details are typed again and again across systems that don’t speak to one another. I’m talking practice-management software, correspondence templates, asset registers, and court e-filing systems to name a few.

You might type and re-type the same name and address 10 times in an hour (and that’s not including filling out asset-holder forms). More than half of surveyed firms in The Australian Probate Report 2025 identified double data entry as a major frustration.

It’s been over half a century since we walked on the moon; lawyers are right to expect more

Death certificates, wills, identification documents, and assorted financial records must all be manually entered and re-entered, often from a mix of PDFs, scans, handwritten notes, online forms, shoeboxes full of paperwork dumped on a desk…

Some digital intake tools can solve part of the problem, collecting client information online and exporting it as static PDFs, forcing practitioners to re-enter that same data manually.

Research with our Expert Advisory Panel revealed a whole host of issues to us that we wanted to fix. One of our Expert Advisors—Sarah Minter from Coulter Legal—was particularly engaged, showing a keen interest in what we might be able to deliver.

Sarah described how these inefficiencies compound daily: skilled staff spend valuable hours on repetitive clerical work, increasing the risk of transcription errors and diverting attention from meaningful client assistance. She needed a system that eliminated duplication without adding complexity: something that just works.

Sarah’s technologically proactive, having already reached for a handful of tools like AI note-taking software and to-do list apps. This got us wondering whether AI could read important information from documents—as opposed to from a client meeting—and then use that information to populate documents.

We created a prototype which was pretty mediocre, more of a proof of concept than much else. While it only got the job done with standardised, well-defined sets of documents, we demo’d it with Sarah.

“Most examples of AI seem to create more work or take the interesting creative work”, she told us. “The feature you showed was the first example of AI which had me excited! I think it might be the robovac of the tech world.”

She talked us through all the use cases for what we’d shown her, and that’s what gave us the confidence to invest in a proper build-out.

It wasn’t easy. It took dozens of iterations with a variety of AI models and custom back-end logic to get it working reliably enough to roll out. But when we rolled it out to Sarah, she was impressed.

With Sarah’s guidance, Vale’s AI Matter Creation feature now automatically extracts information from client documents and populates all relevant fields: names, addresses, executors, beneficiaries, assets, liabilities, and key dates across matter files and forms. No double-handling. No re-typing. No endless cross-checking.

We even added a “review stage” to make it easier for our users to check the AI’s outputs, giving lawyers total oversight over the feature’s output.

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2. Estate Discovery

We’d figured out how to create a matter by just uploading the documents you already have. But the next hurdle...

Discovery.

Contacting banks, share registries, super funds, aged care homes, crypto exchanges and everyone else, confirming assets and balances one letter at a time.

Discovery is a problem. This is an area where “access to justice” falls down in probate. The Australian Probate Report 2025 found that more than 90% of lawyers would conduct more comprehensive estate discovery if it were more cost-effective. This means that assets are probably getting lost in the inheritance process! How much? No-one knows!

Again, let’s put this into perspective: With a $5.4T intergenerational wealth transfer occurring over the next two decades, facilitating effective and comprehensive discovery is crucial.

Our research had already shown that while most probate lawyers were familiar with the Australian Death Notification Service and had used it at least once—the responses they got back from asset-holders were not fit-for-purpose for lawyers. So we already knew that there was both need and appetite here to streamline the discovery process.

We put on our thinking caps and drew a bunch of designs as to how we could optimise what lawyers were already doing, focusing on speed and simplicity. Then we road-tested our designs with our Expert Advisors.

One advisor who provided extremely helpful feedback was Emily Lane from Lane & O’Rourke. When describing her workflow, the inefficiency became infinitely more tangible to us. Working in a small firm doing an enormous amount of work, she and her colleagues were spending more time finding asset-holder contact details and email addresses than actually writing letters. For Emily and the Lane & O’Rourke team, every minute matters.

We were motivated to make the discovery process as easy as possible, and the outcome was 2-Click Discovery.

The feature automates the entire discovery process while retaining the trust and flexibility of practitioners’ existing workflow.

The feature draws from a verified database of over 2,000 institutions, each with current contact details, document requirements, and preferred correspondence formats. From the matter file, Vale auto-drafts a discovery letter for each asset holder, pre-populating not only the relevant matter information, but also the asset-holder’s contacts details, and sends it off! Two clicks, and every letter is out the door.

Practitioners can check and edit each letter before sending - just to make sure! And each item of correspondence is logged and captured within Vale to help track the progress of the matter, maintain visibility, and simplify follow-ups.

This system eliminates thousands of hours spent on administrative repetition across roughly 100,000 probate files each year. Emily put it simply:

“Every time I hit ‘Send Notifications,’ I’m reminded of Vale’s value.”

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3. Next Steps & Follow-Ups

With matter creation and discovery now streamlined, our research highlighted where the next wave of inefficiency could occur: after discovery, when lawyers must track responses, chase institutions, and manage multiple staff across open files of varying complexities and progress statuses.

Lawyers on our Expert Advisory Panel described this phase as cognitively exhausting work that depended on memory, handwritten notes, or reminders scattered across systems. Firms operating at high volumes have developed their own systems to track matters as they progress, from shared spreadsheets to physical files being manually moved from one box to the next.

Most of the lawyers we spoke to had struggled to establish a workable system, with a lack of real-time visibility causing serious headaches.

But Amanda Weier’s team at Payne Butler Lang had established a system that worked extremely well for keeping matter progress visible and tangible. The problem was, it was paper-based.

Hearing from Amanda motivated us to develop a feature that would allow her the same level of visibility into matter progress that her current system provided, but in a digital form accessible anytime, anywhere at the click of a button. Something that would offer a matter-level view of correspondence that has gone out, what replies are due, what needs to happen next, and who is responsible.

So we set our sights on a lightweight system that could make Amanda’s physical and mental data visible in Vale.

The Follow-Ups feature was the outcome. Automated prompts replaced ad-hoc reminders, while the software tracks external correspondence and accountability by recording and monitoring letters, emails, and requests sent to financial institutions, share registries, and other asset holders. Each time correspondence is sent, the system records who it went to, when it was sent, and what information was requested.

If no reply is received within a set timeframe, Vale generates a contextual reminder prompting the practitioner to act—eliminating the need for spreadsheet trackers, inbox searches, or manual, paper-based reminders.

Amanda’s insights helped get Follow-Ups where it needed to be, but we wanted to take things a step further.

While Follow-Ups helps lawyers keep tabs on their correspondence with the outside world, many lawyers told us that what happens inside the matter can be equally disorienting. Once external correspondence is underway, practitioners still need to track their own progress, knowing what has been done, what’s pending, and what needs to happen next. This is where Next Steps begins.

Again, our Expert Advisory Panel gave us a clear indication of the complexities at this stage of estate administration. We unpacked what that internal navigation problem really looks like in practice with Asheetha Jelliffe from Bridges Lawyers, who described the mental toll of juggling multiple open matters—each at a different stage, with different documents, dependencies, and team members involved.

Even with strong internal systems, matter orientation was suffering from the same issues outlined above: more spreadsheets and ad-hoc reminders.

What she needed was immediate contextual awareness: the ability to open a matter and instantly see where it stood, what information was outstanding, and what task needed attention next. Asheetha needs her staff to hit the ground running, without having to rediscover everything about a matter every time it’s re-visited just to know what steps to take next.

Her feedback shaped Next Steps into an intelligent, dynamic roadmap within each file. The feature interprets matter data in real time and presents a sequenced overview—“awaiting bank response,” “prepare probate application,” or “request collection from super fund”—updating automatically as each step is completed.

This allows lawyers and their teams to maintain momentum and continuity, even when multiple people collaborate across files.

Amanda and Asheetha’s input helped us to create two features that facilitate high-volume, high-complexity workplaces, where supervision and continuity across team members are critical.

Together, Follow-Ups and Next Steps close the loop on a feature set that ensures matters are created quickly, that correspondence is sent efficiently and professionally, that nothing slips through the cracks, and that matters aren’t stalled by lack of internal transparency.

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Wrapping up

All of these features—AI Matter Creation, 2-Click Discovery, Next Steps and Follow-Ups—have been shaped directly by the lawyers who need them.

We’ll share more stories from our Expert Advisory Panel soon. But for now, we’re proud to be building a platform that transforms insight into function, helping practitioners save time, reduce risk, and focus on what matters most: their clients.

If you’d like to see how Vale can transform the way your firm handles probate, join the waitlist here.

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Tom O’Neill | Vale.legal | The Australian Probate Report 2025 | Contact | Archive

Most of this time was with the practitioners and clerks who made up the Vale Expert Advisory Panel on Digital Estate Administration.

For a profession with a reputation for billing in 6-minute increments, the generosity we received from our advisory panel was astounding.

Building a software platform to streamline estate administration wasn’t something we did on our own. The wisdom of this incredible community of probate experts has turned Vale from an idea into a trusted software platform that’s transforming the way estate administration is done.

If you’d like to see what we’ve been working on, click below to join our waitlist.

Waitlisted firms receive free access to Vale for all your matters until 2026 and a host of other perks.

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The Vale Journey

The journey to streamline the estate administration process was originally a means to an end: to avoid having to complete yet another Link Market Services Share Transfer form.

But I received some foundational pearls from a mentor right at the beginning:

Don’t build in silence, and don’t build just for yourself. You need to talk to people and build something others want!

Fantastic advice.

Reaching out

I reached out to Tara Lucke and asked if she’d put a call out in The Art of Estate Planning Facebook group.

Within days, a small group of regional, suburban and city-based firms had volunteered to help map the probate journey, in all its n all its minutiae, nuance, and frustrations, from start to finish.

In our initial meetings, we shared a stack of digital cards in an online collaboration workspace on FigJam. The workspace started out like this:

We needed to understand the procedural and jurisdictional nuances that practitioners between all firms and across all states and territories experience daily.

We asked practitioners to identify and rank their most significant pain points on a scale from 0 (painless) to 10 (extreme pain).

At the end of the session, the workspace looked something like the image below:

We presented a collection of ‘pain-killer’ concepts, asking the lawyers to order our suggestions from least appealing (left) to most appealing (right).

Here’s an example of what they came up with:

We learned that practitioners’ main frustrations fell into two broad areas:

1. Managing relationships with institutions: banks, super funds, share registries, aged care providers, etc: each with its own forms, requirements, and delays.

2. Managing relationships with beneficiaries: coordinating distributions, managing expectations, and ensuring funds flow predictably and securely.

Our advisors described everyday obstacles in detail: banks with seven different probate thresholds and twenty-five different forms; super funds insisting on original paper documents mailed to processing centres; share registries rejecting correspondence because of a slight difference in date format. Some institutions lost correspondence entirely; others took months to respond. The worst story we heard was of a deceased estate with 80 issuer-sponsored shareholdings, to be transferred to 5 beneficiaries. The practitioner spent his weekend preparing 400 hard copy share transfer forms.

It’s certainly difficult to deliver transparent, reliable services for clients when no-one knows if a financial institution will take three days or three months to respond to a discovery letter.

The Prototype (learning the hard way)

After these initial interviews, we thought we understood what people wanted.

So we designed a product.

Everyone was excited.

Until we realised that what we’d only digitised estate administration in theory.

To make this system work, we’d need buy-in from every financial institution in the country—and we weren’t prepared to wait until 2035 to see real changes. We saw client expectations shifting far quicker than that!

So we took what we had learned in our interviews and began building in increments.

Vale’s first prototype was a distribution tool—a way for firms to generate bulk payment files to help make beneficiary distributions more efficient. It worked beautifully, and nobody bought it.

Lawyers had told us in expert detail what needed fixing, and we’d even created a tool that worked. But it didn’t fit into lawyers’ workflows.

Our prototype is a fine example of what happens when you stop talking to users.

We needed to find a way to be closer to the profession and be sure that we were building something others want.

The Vale Expert Advisory Panel on Digital Estate Administration

Having learned our lesson, we reached out to a group of accredited specialists, leading wills and estates practitioners and probate clerks across Australia, and asked for help.

This led to the establishment of Vale’s Expert Advisory Panel in early 2024.

Over the following months, we met fortnightly with more than forty wills and estates lawyers from a wide variety of firms. In each session, our team shared new designs, concepts, and prototypes for review. The feedback was candid and forensic.

After five successive proofs-of-concept, more detailed patterns began to emerge. Our advisors’ collective insight converged around some important priorities:

• Simplicity: None of our advisors had got into probate practice to become expert form-fillers. The administrative layers—dozens of duplicative letters, inconsistent institutional requirements, and manual data entry across multiple portals—were exhausting and consumed time everyone wished could be spent on legal reasoning and client care. There was a clear need for a system that stripped away the noise so practitioners could focus on their core work.

• Efficiency: Our advisors described spending hours re-entering the same information into different bank or superannuation forms, or chasing institutions that rejected applications over trivial formatting inconsistencies. They wanted tools that could reduce the cognitive and time load of these processes, ideally through automation, access to templates, and the centralisation of institutional requirements more broadly in a single place.

• Communication: We learned that one of the hardest jobs in probate practice wasn’t managing the work, but managing client expectations. Clients almost always feel lost in the process and in the dark about what’s happening or how long things will take—especially when external delays are unpredictable. Our advisors wanted better ways to keep clients informed, confident, and calm through the process. We thought real-time matter-tracking could be a game changer for clients and practitioners alike.

• Integration: Above all, our advisors felt like they were juggling a whole host of differently sized and differently weighted balls. Estate administration is fragmented across banks, share registries, super funds, court portals, executors, beneficiaries and others, with little interoperability in between. The profession didn’t need another system that would end up feeling like another ball had been introduced to the mix—it needed a system that felt like an extra pair of hands.

This convergence of needs became Vale’s blueprint.

How Vale Builds

At the end of 2024, we released Vale’s first minimum viable product (MVP) inviting a small group of firms to start using it in real matters. Some feedback was gentle, some was brutal, but all of it was gold. Every comment and every suggestion nudged the design closer to what it needed to be.

But the feedback was coming faster than we could build. We were learning faster than we could move. It was at this point that we brought in Damien Thiesson, and another senior developer, Sam McMurtrie, to rebuild Vale from the ground up.

By September, the same early firms were using the new product. Faster, sturdier, and built to evolve. Suddenly everything moved differently. Features were shipping in days, not months, and usage began to spike.

This is the version you’ll access when you join the waitlist.

The Shared End

At its core, Vale exists to make the estate administration process easier for law firms and for clients.

Direction, wisdom, and dedication to the provision of quality legal services have never been in short supply in this country. What the development of our Expert Advisory Panel revealed is that progress in legal technology doesn’t come from disruption, but from collaboration; from listening, testing, refining, and building alongside those who understand the work best.

It also offered a glimpse into something essential about the culture of legal practice. Meaningful progress rarely arrives through the imposition of new systems. It’s uncovered through patience, and is revealed by standing beside practitioners, listening closely, testing ideas together, and allowing better ways of working to emerge naturally from the expertise that already exists within the profession.

Every hour spent mapping pain points;

Every frustrating anecdote about lost correspondence or endless certification requirements;

Every suggestion scribbled in Figma and outlined on Post-It notes across our walls;

Every ounce of feedback, kind and brutal;

It’s all now part of our DNA.

The most forward-thinking work in law doesn’t come from speed or scale. It comes from listening—and from the collective willingness to build something that endures.

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Since its September release, The Australian Probate Report 2025 has been downloaded by hundreds of wills and estates practitioners around the country.

It is invigorating and rewarding to have received such a positive response, and we feel grateful to have been able to facilitate a national, collaborative, data-driven approach to supporting the delivery of quality services in such an important area of legal practice.

What we’ve gathered from practitioners’ responses so far is that those working in probate and estate administration need to see more attention being paid to the sharing of information that supports both professional development and the provision of better services.

The good news? We’re not going anywhere. We called it The Australian Probate Report 2025 for a reason.

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For those who haven’t read it yet, The Report looks into important trends shaping Australian probate and estate administration—from filing delays and regional work volumes to evolving pricing models, staffing pressures, and the growing role of new technologies—all within the broader demographic and economic landscape in which we operate.

We want to thank the 50+ wills and estates lawyers and clerks who contributed. My team and I are looking forward to building on everything we learned in the process to deliver an even more detailed, comprehensive and insightful publication for the profession in 2026.

Funding for The Report came from Vale, a technology company I started after leaving full-time legal practice in 2022. My goal in creating Vale was to remove as much friction as possible from the estate administration process.

Now, 3 years in, we’re a team of 6: Damien (Co-Founder & CTO), Sam (Principal Engineer), Kes (Head of Product Design), Jane (Head of Growth), Joshua (Head of Communications) and myself. James (furthest on the left) is our contracted designer, who pulled the whole report together.

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Why we wrote The Report

No-one can expect to successfully remove friction from processes as complex as estate administration without a serious, collaborative approach to understanding exactly what’s going on. Reliance on my personal experience in practice is not sufficient.

We pulled as much publicly available data as we could find. Court data. National economic data. Professional services data. Demographics. Whatever might help us to map the lay of the land.

We also met with about 100 firms—40 of which participated in an expert advisory panel in 2024—and spent more than 200 hours interviewing solicitors and clerks in busy wills and estates practices across the country. We also put out a national survey of wills and estates practitioners, which had more than 50 contributions.

Our research was originally intended for internal purposes, but the story it told was of demonstrable significance to the profession more broadly. Probate lawyers will oversee an estimated $5.4 trillion in wealth changing hands over the next two decades, the complexity of estate administration is growing quickly, and technology is changing our world at an even more rapid rate. The implications of this for law firms, their staff and their clients are of huge national significance.

We wanted to understand:

• To what extent is the profession equipped to handle the challenges and opportunities ahead?

• How will jurisdictional differences affect practitioners and clients in the coming decades?

• What are the leading firms doing well, and what can others learn from them?

• How is technology affecting the wills and estates legal services in Australia?

• What is it that wills and estates lawyers need most right now, and what would it take to deliver those needs?

Some findings proved what lawyers already know:

• Staffing costs and recruitment are a top operational concern for firms.

• Streamlining operations remains a leading priority.

• Fixed-fee pricing is now standard for wills but still rare in estate administration.

Other findings surprised us:

• Timeframes for obtaining grants and filing fees vary wildly across jurisdictions.

• Regional firms are experiencing a boom, as are city firms who extend their reach to underserved regional areas.

• AI tools are being widely trialled, but remain less ‘useful’ than desired.

Our perspective

It’s clear that wills and estates legal practice is becoming more complicated, more consequential, and more specialised. New technologies have facilitated access to a wider variety of assets and family structures have changed. National demographic, economic, and legal developments tick away in the background.

These are only some of the forces adding to the administrative complexity and associated risks of estate administration. We believe that it’s time for the proper development and application of technology specifically designed to meet the needs of modern wills and estates practitioners.

Specialist systems could:

• Significantly reduce resources spent on laborious administrative processes like data entry and letter drafting with intelligent automation.

• Lower the mental load required to manage hundreds of asset holders by centralising institutional requirements and access portals in a single platform.

• Bridge the communication gap with clients by increasing lawyers’ capacity to communicate time-frames and expectations with real-time matter tracking.

• Reduce time spent on trust accounting and risk by providing secure portals between trusted entities.

• Assist in the professional development of junior practitioners by offering basic compliance steps and risk exposure alerts.

This is why we’re building Vale.

What The Report has shown us—more clearly than ever—is where to focus our development efforts in order to best address a landscape of rising demand, complexity, and expectations.

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What’s next

The Australian Probate Report raises as many questions as it has answered.

We’ve already begun drafting the scaffold for next year’s report, and intend to broaden the scope of what’s covered to answer even more questions for wills and estates practitioners across the country.

For now, our team will refocus efforts on building technology that the profession needs to take on mounting complexity, continuing to share what we learn along the way in this newsletter, on LinkedIn and elsewhere.

The (updated) Vale platform is almost ready to go live, so we’ll let you know when you can join the wait list or book a demo to see what we’ve been building.

Finally, if you have any requests, suggestions, ideas or feedback about The Australian Probate Report, we’d love to hear them.

We welcome input from practitioners, institutions, and researchers who share our interest in shaping the future of estate administration.

📊 Read The Australian Probate Report 2025: www.probatereport.com.au

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Co-Founder & CTO at Vale

You might remember the time Nikolai from Russia vanished into the Matrix? While it was many years ago and on a completely different project, lessons learned from that experience speak for themselves: hire people you trust. Invest in solutions that align with a long-term plan, not just those that get you out of a problem.

What do lessons like this culminate in? They lead you to truly understand that value begets value. Nothing against Nikolai, I’m sure he’s a good enough bloke. But ‘good enough bloke’ doesn’t cut it when you’re all in. I’m all in. I want to work with others who are all in too.

It’s time to introduce you to Damien Thiesson…

Damo is unapologetically direct. “I’m no bullshit,” he says, laughing that his French bluntness can sometimes be “confronting” in Sydney.

If you ask Damien “Damo” Thiesson what he does, he’ll probably tell you something like: “I make things work better.” Which, in his case, has meant everything from billion-dollar warehouse systems to the future of probate law in Australia.

Before coming on board as co-founder of Vale, Damo was the Principal Engineer at THE ICONIC.

But how did he end up here, with us? In legaltech? Designing probate-sector specific software on the cusp of a decades-long growth spurt for the industry?

We found him through a recruiter. One with a reputation for nabbing “difficult to find people”.

Apparently this guy, with decades of experience and a demonstrated interest in both product and business optimisation, had made his way to the top of a 75 person engineering team and led some seriously impressive initiatives. Damo ended up the guy the CTO at THE ICONIC leaned on when it was time to redesign warehouse systems, overhaul logistics, future-proof core systems, or build the loyalty architecture that kept customers coming back.

Just to put things in perspective:
Small tweaks at scale can make monumental differences, and Damo was the guy overseeing the tweaking in a billion-dollar business. I couldn’t help but wonder what it would look like to have someone this invested in business optimisation not just on the team as an Engineer, but helping lead it.

The truth is that Vale is a response to a variety of needs expressed by wills and estates lawyers—needs that I discovered in my years as a probate lawyer. I thought a lot about what it takes for practitioners and firms to see the value in adopting better systems. Damo coming on board was an example of Vale putting its money where its mouth is. Not only is he a pleasure to work with and a truly impressive CTO. People like Damo are a testament to the importance of reaching for high-value, high-return assets—and in this case, that asset is a walking, talking, and extremely capable human.

When I first hear about Damo I asked myself:
What might someone capable of building lean, high-value, high-return systems for billion dollar multinationals be able to deliver for Vale, both as a product and a business?

I couldn’t wait to find out.

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When we first sat down, I thought I was interviewing Damo for a senior engineering role. I can’t remember if it was our first or our second conversation, but it was pretty early on that he made it clear he was looking for more than just a job. It happened around the moment he told me: “Forget salary. Let’s talk equity.” For someone who generally holds his cards pretty close to his chest…

Here was a highly competent, experienced, and business-savvy guy looking for a product to help build, and a company to help steer. Lucky for us, he thought probate was worth the trouble. Which, if you think about it, is pretty cool. Of all the industries a French engineer could pick, he moved from a billion-dollar international fashion giant to optimising a comparatively small legal process in Sydney, Australia.

But that’s Damo. If it’s challenging, important, and full of promise… he’s in. I guess he saw what all of us at Vale see: that what we’re working on is one of those rare combinations of both a worthwhile cause and a huge opportunity.

When I asked Damo to reflect back on how he ended up working at Vale, he said: “It’s not often you meet someone you actually want to work with long-term.” (Which I’m taking as a compliment.)

Truth is, we clicked straight away. We trust each other’s calls, which means we can move fast without circling back a hundred times. He tells me when my ideas won’t scale; I tell him when his ideas won’t make sense to lawyers. It works.

Partnerships like this one are rare. As we sit here having another chocolat chaud, Damo says it’s one of the main reasons he signed on for the long haul.

It wasn’t always this satisfying. Damo’s tweenage jobs were much the same as many of ours. Not so glamorous. Cleaning toilets at a swimming pool, stocking frozen food shelves at 4am, or enduring a mind-numbingly boring stint at IBM surrounded by colleagues counting the days to retirement.

That’s why, for over a decade, he’s deliberately chosen only roles he’s excited to wake up for. “I haven’t had to go to a job I didn’t want to go to for 15 years,” he says.

Originally from Paris, Damo first came to Australia 13 years ago on a working holiday to learn English. He never left.

Back home he’d been working jobs where too many staff were just watching the clock. In Sydney, he found energy, balance, and people (like us) who value drive.

Now based in Coogee, Damo gets the best of both worlds: world-class beaches and jogging tracks, more gyms than Jims, and an office at Sydney Uni a quick bike ride away.

He happily works weekends for the same reasons I do. It’s not about masochism or workaholism or anything like that. It’s the opposite. Damo enjoys contributing to “my business running,” just like I do.

He sips his hot chocolate before counting out dot points for me to “write down these things, even if you don’t listen to anything else I say.” His motivations are:

1. “Make the business a success.”

2. “Wake up every day to create something genuinely useful.”

3. “Work alongside people I actually like.”

I ask what the future holds. Damo sees “Vale as a mature legaltech leader within five years, with international expansion on the horizon.”

Good answer, Damo.

Before starting Vale, I built a product called Clarity. It was a command-line tool that filled Word documents using data from an Excel spreadsheet. It supported conditional logic. Stuff like inserting “her” instead of “his”, or a maintenance clause to a will if minor beneficiaries could be inheriting. Simple stuff, but time-saving stuff designed to free up my own internal CPU and clear the clutter.

I built it over a few weekends, and it worked well enough. For me.

Then I tried to roll it out to the rest of the firm at O’Neill Solicitors.

Chaos.

The tool didn’t launch properly on half the computers because of operating system issues. The only developer I’d worked with, Nikolai from Russia, who I’d found on Upwork for $3 an hour, had long since vanished into the Matrix.

Apple soon rolled out a security update that broke it for good. I forked out thousands of dollars to fix it, driven as much by a sunk cost fallacy as I was a serious determination to make our work easier.

I eventually hired another developer just to get it running again. It never quite worked the way I needed it to. Especially for those at the firm who weren’t me.

The first real lesson I learned about building software reminds me of a friend who bought a gorgeous MV Augusta F4 (a very cool motorcycle). Fast. Elegant. Classic. Every square inch machined by hand, most likely a weathered elderly Italian master craftsman.

I think it made him feel like Bruce Wayne. He was the envy of every other motorcyclist in Sydney. But it spent half its life at the mechanic before he bought a Honda.

Faster doesn’t matter if you can’t reliably get from A to B. Especially when B is within walking distance. Most of my colleagues were happy enough walking, and I was designing roller-skates that didn’t work.

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But what happens when the world starts moving faster around us?

Like I covered a couple weeks ago I’ve got a degree in mechatronic engineering and have always enjoyed taking things apart to figure out how they work, what happens when they don’t, and what I can do about it. I like building things. Systems. Logic flows. Repeatable solutions.

So when I joined the firm, I naturally started poking holes in the tools we were using.

In 2018 we were still running on Corel WordPerfect. It worked better for the staff than the “modern” tools, but clients hated getting files they couldn’t open. The truth was that stone age software was fitting our firm’s needs better than anything else on offer.

We were paying for Leap at $200 to $300 per license but only really using the trust accounting feature. The rest sat idle. Document automation was too slow. Precedents weren’t flexible. There was no way to add logic or reduce manual editing. I wanted more.

So I tried. First with Clarity. Then with a conveyancing intake form built in Microsoft Forms. The idea was to cut down the meeting time and let the client fill out a long questionnaire in advance, then I’d just confirm details on a quick call. Smart, right?

Ugh. Not quite.

I tested it on a young, tech-savvy couple. They came back a few days later and told me (very politely) that it was awful. It took them over two hours. The questions were confusing. They didn’t know what half of it meant and left them anxious.

Awesome, I had officially contributed to the young couple’s anxiety market. I had caused localised disruption. The bad kind.

And they were right. I’d taken my own domain knowledge for granted. When I ask questions in person, I can read body language. I can sense hesitation. I can ask a follow-up or soften the tone. A static form doesn’t do that.

The mistake I made wasn’t technical. It was directional. I’d optimised for speed. My speed, not theirs. I’d ignored our clients’ need for support along the way.

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At the time, I was also going through that break up I regaled you all with last week. I threw myself into fitness. I did a six-month SAS prep program. I was running hills with 40kg on my back. Training six days a week. Working full-time. Building Clarity on the side. In hindsight, I was trying to outrun personal discomfort by doing as much as possible, as fast as possible. I reckon I mirrored this in the workplace.

Eventually, I crashed. The software I built broke. The systems I tried to implement didn’t stick. And I realised: you can’t optimise your way out of a problem without building solid support structures first.

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Building support. For us all.

What I’ve come to understand (slowly) is that the most meaningful kind of progress isn’t the kind that rushes. It’s not about hacking the process to move faster. It’s about building tools that give us the space to operate well. Tools that support us. Probate taught me that.

When we built Clarity, I treated speed-focused tools like silver bullets. I wasn’t wrong about our need for new tools, but I missed the mark on their overall purpose. Hundreds of hours of surveying lawyers, thousands of hours of practise, and uncountable hours spent developing and using probate-sector-specific digital tools have shown me that what we actually need is the ability to be technically supported in the hard parts, instead of treating tools like self-driving motorbikes, hopping on the back, and expecting to be zipped to the end of a process.

Probate can be tedious, delicate, and messy. There I was, in my 20s, seeing the world through a prism of potential life-hacks and engineering for speed.

Software, internal processes, and practice management systems should strive for speed, sure. But focusing on speed and efficiency at the expense of user support is an inefficient way of achieving much at all.

I’ll explain:

It took years in wills and estates of putting the cart before the horse. I engineered the way I’d tried to recover from a breakup.

The kind of tools we need are those that support the work we already know how to do, not speed-run us through it. Tools that stop you from passive-aggressively emailing your assistant about the missing title (again) are tools that bring support to your workflow. Tools that let you remember where a matter is up to without scanning three folders and six emails can change a lawyer’s day. Tools that make it easier to be a good lawyer, not just a busy one, are tools that see efficiency as a by-product of support.

Building Vale hasn’t been fast.

I’ve had to learn a new domain every few months. Product design, fundraising, legal structuring, team leadership, marketing…

I’ve made mistakes. Some I’m still paying for. But I’m glad it’s taken time. Because each detour has reminded me what I’m actually trying to build.

Not a shortcut. Not a hack.

But a system that respects the work. A product that enables slowness and care. A support system.

A platform that helps lawyers do this job with more confidence, more consistency, and more clarity.

Because when the work is heavy, faster isn’t always better. It’s support that we need.

You can’t ride roller-skates in the rain. But with a little support—a little calm before the storm—you won’t need to.

Something pretty big came up in the past couple of weeks at work.

Something that has me thinking back to when my heartbroken ass first found itself in a therapist’s chair.

Something I first heard around the time I exceeded the 10-session limit on my Medicare-subsidised mental health plan, many years ago.

The team at Vale — which you’ll be hearing much more about soon — is putting together a report on the Australian probate landscape.

We’ve combed through inordinate amounts of data, as well as having conducted a national survey, painstakingly documenting the current state of the probate sector. We soon realised that our findings could be of significant value to firms and practitioners nation-wide, and so here we are.

We haven’t released it yet, so please stop reading if you’re particularly sensitive to spoilers.

In a section on the different services being provided by our sector, we noticed a predictable disparity between the demand for simple wills and the demand for more complex services.

While we understand the huge importance of simple will services, we were curious about whether there are instances in which simple wills are being offered in lieu of more appropriate services. Naturally, our data pointed to cost barriers for clients, as well as capacity barriers among some firms.

But then something hit me. Something strangely personal.

Are ‘cost barriers’ for clients always the result of financial constraints? What would it mean if they weren’t? What if clients’ demands exist independently of clients’ actual needs?

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Just, Quick, and Cheap Pizza

Let’s step out of probate and start with an analogous example:

It is not a cost ‘barrier’ that stops me from ordering pizza from Bella Brutta on King Street.

I can afford gourmet pizza, and I know that it’s healthier and tastier than Domino’s.

But Domino’s arrives in 20 minutes, costs half the price, and as someone with an active lifestyle, I’m not that concerned about the extra 200-400 calories.

In other words, I have a preference for cheap and quick pizza. I understand enough about the differences in these products for my pizza needs to be aptly represented by my pizza demands.

As my needs are adequately reflected by my educated demands, the quick and cheap delivery of pizza from Domino’s and into Tom O’Neill represents a just transaction.

But how just would the administering of pizza be to a hungry consumer with no prior understanding of the differences between Bella Brutta and Domino’s?

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Demands v Needs

What if cost ‘barriers’ were, in many cases, just cost ‘preferences’? And what if those preferences were guided by factors other than our various services’ strengths and weaknesses, or those services’ appropriateness for someone in need?

Worse still, what if the general public knew so little about probate that they were unable to preference services better suited to their own unique situations? What if prospective clients ranked the probate services they would be most likely to seek based not on an appreciation of their own needs, but on the only metric they understand: cost.

I maintain that while this is a totally reasonable way to choose a bottle of wine when you know nothing about wine, it’s a terrible way to select legal services (if you can avoid it).

So, we might need to re-think what we really mean when we refer to ‘cost barriers’, need, and demand.

How often are we conflating Australians’ genuine inability to afford Bella Brutta — or, potentially more appropriate probate services — with a mere preference for ‘cheap’ and ‘quick’?

In a perfect world, the legal services market would operate how all markets should. Informed, rational people shop around for the most cost-effective ways to create a will, aware of the differences between services and aware of their own needs.

This scenario is something that we should, in principle, be proud to be able to deliver. Transparency and client agency should be celebrated when delivered. If clients were steering the market towards providing cheaper services, then they’d be doing what Australian consumers did with our Telcos. (Yes, blame your social media addiction on the market forces that brought us unlimited data plans.)

ECON101 textbooks tell us that suppliers respond to market demands in order to compete. It follows that the suppliers of legal services should therefore respond to the rational and informed demands of clients.

Right..?

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The ‘rational’ consumer.

But what if Peter Noel Murray (PhD) is right?

“Who is Peter Noel Murray?”, you ask.

Peter Noel Murray is a member of the American Psychological Association and the Society of Consumer Psychology, and the founder & CEO of EmotionInc and Principal of Peter Noel Murray PhD and Partners, a research-based consulting practice focusing on emotion and behaviour change.

Dr. Murray is someone who believes that consumers might not be as rational as we’re assuming:

“Consumers believe that they act rationally to maximize their personal best interests when making purchase decisions… But consumer rationality is more myth than fact. We know this from an in-depth analysis of consumers’ self-reported behavior and a review of the psychological factors that affect their purchasing process.”
— ‘The Myth of the Rational Consumer’, Psychology Today 8/3/2016.

Dr. Murray’s work, among the work of many others economists and psychologists, confirm that we are right to ask the questions we’ve been asking: What if Australians were shopping for the cheapest services without understanding the scope and value of our sector’s broader services on offer?

What if the data we’re using about ‘client demand’ compels us to conflate ‘demand’ and ‘need’?

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Pain-full decision making

I really did have my heart broken in my 20s. It was bad. Driven by a crushed self-esteem and a penchant for escapism, I did what any irrational serotonin scavenger would do. I embarked on an SAS training program which involved 6 months of 6-days-per-week gruelling training. For those less familiar, this is military-style physical training program designed for those who want to enter the elite special forces.

I got super fit. I watched my arms grow, my shoulders broaden, and the time I’d been devoting to emotional pain was now being interrupted by physical pain. My dehydration levels however remained constant, break-up tears having been replaced by vomits in between burpees.

I vigorously trained my way into therapy (the chin-ups didn’t work). If you haven’t seen a therapist, I strongly suggest it. No matter where you are in life, to have another human help us understand ourselves is a remarkable privilege.

I was exercising a demand: to escape emotional pain.

But what I learned in therapy was that my needs were very different to the demands I was exercising. While it felt like immediate relief through masochistic exercise would satisfy the demand to not grieve, what I really needed was something else.

Humans are guided by pretty simple drivers. Pleasure. Efficiency. Simplicity. I wanted to feel better, I found a simple solution, and I found a program that promised its delivery efficiently.

As probate lawyers, we are guided by a pretty simple mandate. The just, quick, and cheap delivery of legal services.

If our sector takes clients’ legal literacy for granted, we assume that our clients are aware of their actual needs and how best to have those needs satisfied. If we were to convince ourselves that client demand for simple wills is an apt reflection of the Australian population’s actual need for simple wills alone, we would be assuming that our sector’s clients are an exception to the rule.

Here’s what we know:

• I can’t count the number of times that clients have told me that what they want is absolutely not what they need;

• Wills and estates can be accompanied by serious emotional baggage, from heartbreak, to grief, to seething interpersonal resentment. If there were ever dispositions that may bestow clarity, these are not those;

• That the delivery of the ‘quick’ and the ‘cheap’ can come at the expense of the ‘just’;

• That the demand for ‘quick’ and ‘cheap’ can often have more to do with misunderstanding than financial barriers.

Our report will go into some more detail on what I’ve outlined above—without the diatribe about 20-something-year-old me’s maladaptive coping mechanisms.

In the meantime, I’d love to hear some thoughts on how to better educate the Australian population about our sector’s services, and whether or not you think that client demands for certain services are actually reflective of their needs.

We’re experiencing a pretty sizeable inter-generational wealth transfer. It’s within everyone’s best interests that we facilitate educated and informed needs-based demands of our legal services.

If you read my last post, you’re familiar with a difficult realisation I came to not long ago.

Five years of handling probate matters gave me a stack of competence and confidence. But it took something from me, too. What drew me to probate law in the first place was the human element; the chance to be there for people when they most need to be understood.

I discovered that while that experience undoubtedly made me better at my job in a whole host of ways, all those hours spent overseeing wills and estates hadn’t at all helped me to communicate with my clients. In fact, it had got in the way.

Moving Parts

Before law, I worked at a financial technology start-up. I’ve got a degree in mechatronic engineering and have always enjoyed taking things apart to figure out how they work, what happens when they don’t, and what I can do about it.

While I wouldn’t say I enjoyed being called a “f***wit”, I’d be lying if I said I didn’t also get a kick out of trying to solve for that accusation. (You’re reading the results.)

I think it makes sense why I love wills and estates. Drafting a will is like putting a machine together and administering an estate is like operating the final product.

Wills that aren’t drafted properly are much like any poorly designed or manufactured product in that they can end up causing a whole host of consequences for both clients and lawyers alike.

But while probate law might attract a technically minded person, the job demands far more than mechanical thinking. Our clients are grieving. They're confused. Even on a good day, they struggle to understand us.

This is our responsibility to cater to. But in probate law, we have a responsibility to be more than merely a manufacturing line for wills and estates — we have a responsibility to be human, first and foremost because we’re so often dealing with humans experiencing profoundly human needs.

Remember what you… forgot?

In my last post, I promised to think more deeply about how experience, empathy, and that inner ‘junior lawyer’ are related. I haven’t stopped thinking about it since.

Why? Because junior lawyers have something we don’t. Something we forgot.

I think we lose something that we once had as we accrue experience. We forget what it’s like to know nothing about probate. We take for granted how much our clients understand.

In other words, experience can become a wall between you and your client.

So the lawyer in me sees the problem. But I’m leaving it to the engineer in me to solve for it:

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1. Over-communicate Everything

Would you rather risk being patronising or confusing?

Think back to when you were starting out. You needed everything explained to you. Your clients are in the same position:

• They don’t know what probate is.

• They don’t know why the Supreme Court is involved.

• They don’t know what a requisition or an affidavit is.

• Some don’t even know who their siblings are!

They’re coming to you because your name is on their dead relative’s will. That’s it.

Everything they don’t know is your responsibility. Not just to act on, but to explain.

In my opinion, we need to ask ourselves (as impractical as it might sound): if cost and time weren’t factors, how would I make this all clear?

We know how long these matters can take. We understand the delays. We know how sketchy some family dynamics can get. Sitting on that information isn’t helping anyone though, is it?

If you want to avoid being called a f---wit (again), communicate. Over-communicate if you have to. Not to protect yourself, but because good communication requires empathy, and empathy makes us better lawyers.

Think about how you communicate, too. I no longer assume the letters I write will be read, let alone understood.

If your clients are on WhatsApp, meet them there. If a quick video explains something better than three paragraphs, record the video.

Don’t make a virtue out of formality. Make a virtue out of being understood.

If you want to bridge the gap between you and your clients, start by remembering what it felt like to know sweet F-A.

And for every question a client asks, assume ten more are sitting silently in their head.

For tips on client communication, subscribe here. I’ll be writing more about this soon.

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2. Clarify Your Role

In most cases, if it hadn’t been written on their deceased relative’s will, they wouldn’t even know your name. The chances are that they might not know precisely what a probate lawyer does. They know your name was on a will. That’s about it.

Early in my career, a client asked me to review a building report for a property she wanted to buy with her inheritance. I walked her through the issues — nothing catastrophic — and she looked up and asked:

“So… do you think I should buy it?”

I had thoughts. But that wasn’t the job.

So I replied, with all the junior lawyer awkwardness in the world: “That’s a matter for you.” Helpful? Not really.

Our clients don’t need us to be decisive. We’re there to help them make decisions for themselves. We empower them. We provide agency. This starts with explaining what our role is and what it isn’t, and helping steer them towards those capable of attending to needs of theirs not under our purview.

What might this look like? In broad brushstrokes, clients often don’t know what questions they need to ask, or who to turn to for guidance on, say, what to do with a building report. We’re uniquely positioned to point our clients in the right direction. For example, we understand that our clients might have trouble understanding building reports. Why would we then not steer them towards someone who might be able to take them through the report and explain its implications? Or have a network of experts to whom we can refer the client in these kinds of situations, where we aren’t able to provide clarity. There is always scope for us to aid our clients in pursuing clarity.

Here’s a thought experiment:

For a month, write down every time a client asks for advice that isn’t strictly legal.

Those moments show where your role needs clearer framing. These gaps are going to provide you with an incredibly useful insight into how you might better clarify your role from the get-go next time.

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3. Trust me, I’m a lawyer…

Trust doesn’t come with the job title anymore. It’s earned.

Clients are sceptical. They’ve read too much online. They’ve been burned before. They’ve heard about “cheaper,” “faster,” and “easier.”

I think people don’t trust lawyers because they don’t understand what lawyers do. That lack of understanding creates a power imbalance. We’re trained to argue, speak in legalese, take meticulous notes, and stay ten steps ahead. And to a client, that can feel like a power imbalance, maybe even like we’re working in the shadows and strategically keeping ourselves beyond reproach.

Trust vibes, I think not.

As the elders in our community say, trust used to be a given. Key phrase: used to be.

There are other factors at play too. Access to information, scandals, social media, TV legal dramas... Clients think they know more. They have access to more information than ever before, and as a result bring all of these hang-ups into their dealings with lawyers like a hangover at a late lunch.

What we know is that the world is full of foodies who can’t cook and car enthusiasts who can’t change a tyre. Theoretical comprehension and the practising of a craft produce wildly different results. And so, we’re relied upon by our clients.

Being relied upon is however not the same as being trusted, and so we have to take trust seriously.

As lawyers, we sell risk mitigation. And our most important tool — or maybe it's not a tool, maybe it’s three-quarters of the shop — is in that trust.

Trust is our currency. It’s not a luxury. It’s a prerequisite for a successful career.

Clients who trust us are easier to help, easier to work with, and far more likely to refer others.

So how do you earn it?

• Communicate clearly

• Be transparent about pricing

• Speak in plain English

• Be efficient

In all honesty, we’re in this together, and I’d love to hear your thoughts. But I’ll say this: saying “trust me” and then speaking in legalese probably isn’t going to cut it.

Some Things I’ve Come Back To

When I think back to that first year, I remember being overwhelmed. But I also remember something useful. Hope. Corny. Lame. But so, so true. I believed the system could be improved. That we could be better.

I still believe that.

More so, actually — because now I’ve seen where and how we fail. And I’m still taking things apart and putting them back together.

The trick is not to harden. Not to default to “it’s always been like this.” Not to forget what it felt like to be new. To not know.

That’s where empathy begins.

And in probate law, that’s where real value lives too.

Dad’s work was rarely discussed at home, and despite having six years of law school under my belt I had no idea what real-world practice would be like.

While probate matters move notoriously slowly, I felt out of my depth fast — gasping for air beneath both seas of paperwork and a broad range of matters varying in complexity.

The word “probate” was being thrown around in ways that had me questioning what our family business even did. I had no idea how to ask a super fund what the hold-up was — or whether I even could? And who the hell are Banks and Goodfellow?

Questions of law. Questions of process. Questions of language. Questions of time.

Questions that I have only been able to answer as the result of having worked alongside experienced lawyers, and from having developed a little experience of my own.

Experience as a double-edged sword

It would have been impossible for me to imagine myself, back then, as someone who would one day have the answers to all of those questions.

You’d expect this to be a sign of progress — and don’t get me wrong, it is.

But something else seems to have happened, too. Something unforeseeable.

What happens when an increase in confidence and competency don’t bear strict correlation with efficacy?

Try this on for size:

What if you found yourself in my shoes, years into legal practice, forced by a single interaction with a client to question whether a junior lawyer might have handled a situation better than yourself?

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What happened:

I took instructions from a client — let’s call him “James” — who was the executor of his father’s estate. James and his sister were the only beneficiaries. They received 50% of the estate each.

James was a great client. We acted when he bought his first home and we had helped with a few other minor matters over the years.

The will was clear and there didn’t appear to be any unusual circumstances that would have raised red flags.

I met with James in-person to explain the process and take instructions.

During the meeting, I explained that the process would likely take 3-6 months (this was at a time when the Registry’s turnaround was usually 2-4 weeks) and that we’d be in touch.

And in touch we were. Shortly after, James found a bundle of his father’s old dividend statements.

He contacted us immediately — we had not yet submitted the probate application.

James didn’t have any SRNs or HINs for these newly-discovered shares, so we did some searches and worked out what James’ father held. That process delayed things by about a month.

Simultaneously, while James was looking for his father’s SRNs and HINs, he came across a letter from a super fund. Again, James let me know and I wrote a letter to the super fund asking for details of any superannuation held.

After not hearing back from the super fund for 3 weeks, I followed up with a call. 57 minutes of hold music later, customer support confirmed they’d received my letter but advised that they would not be replying until they received a third-party authority signed by my client.

Classic.

Of course, I arranged for James to sign the third-party authority. We eventually heard back from the fund, prepared the grant application, and submitted it to the Court.

Finally on track!

But amidst the chaos, I hadn’t appreciated the extent of the delay. Three extra months.

A few years of professional experience had formed a level of tolerance, or even nonchalance, to these kinds of delays. As a junior lawyer I’d been shocked by the glacial pace with which probate matters can progress. In the time since, I seemed to have begun taking for granted that these delays be assumed by my clients, too.

Well. You know what they say about those who assume.

Unbeknown to me, James had been expecting his inheritance to come through in 3 months. He’d set the wheels in motion of his lifelong dream: to open a restaurant!

James had signed a commercial lease (without seeking advice) and about 1 week from commencement, he rang me and angrily demanded to know when probate would be granted.

“I don’t know”, was all I could say.

The application had been submitted one week prior. It would be anywhere between 2 and 12 weeks for the grant to come through. Out of my hands.

James lost it.

Not only was he about to be short on his first month of rent, but he was now at a loss as to how he was going to cover the next 3-4 months too.

He absolutely blasted me.

“What he f*** am I supposed to do! You said 3 months! Now it’s going to be 9 months!? More!? You’re a complete f***wit!”

I’ll admit, my first reaction was defensive.

After all, it wasn’t MY fault he’d signed an expensive commercial lease, nor that he hadn’t sought advice…

Resisting the urge to meet him on his level, I de-escalated.

By the grace of some higher power, James’s landlord was sympathetic and basically let him off the hook. Probate was granted relatively quickly and he got his money within 2 months.

Sure, life goes on, and I was happy to hear that his restaurant is doing well. But our relationship was badly bruised, and I haven’t seen him since.

Where did I go wrong?

Afterwards, I noticed within myself two irreconcilable takes on what had transpired.

The “experienced lawyer” inside me was calling James an idiot. He shouldn’t have signed that lease without advice. Plus, I told him estate administration would take 3-6 months, possibly longer. It’s not my fault that he had gambled on the efficiency of probate law…

But something about blaming someone else didn’t sit right.

I couldn’t ignore the fact that only a few years prior I had been just as in the dark as James. If at no point as a junior lawyer had I considered myself an ‘idiot’, then I had no rights to think of James as one today.

No. James was not an idiot. I had failed him. I had taken his working knowledge of probate law for granted — and saying that sentence out loud makes me feel like an idiot.

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Cleaning the rear-view mirror

My failure to empathise with my client caused my failure to communicate crucial information. He suffered as a result.

The junior lawyer inside me, buried by layers of experience and a hardening to the circumstances around the practice of probate law, would have more naturally empathised with James. But here I was, trying to think like someone who I no longer am — trying to think in manual — in order to make sense of James’s experience.

Now here I am, writing about my new-found desire to re-establish a relationship with the junior lawyer I was so excited to leave behind.

What did Tom O’Neill know or feel that Tom O’Neill 5+ years PQE might not?

How can re-connecting with a junior lawyer mindset help me to provide the highest quality client service possible?

I’m going to mull this over and update you with where I land.

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