Why we published the Australian Probate Report.
With immense gratitude to the many who contributed.
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.
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.
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.
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