Can I Challenge The Inheritance Arrangements?
The courts will consider challenges to the distribution of inheritance based on various legal grounds. These can include whether a will is valid or whether financial provision should be awarded to relatives of someone who has passed away.
People have the right to make a claim (and challenge the inheritance arrangements) if they qualify under the legal criteria set out in the law.
This is known as ‘Legal Standing’.
What is ‘Legal Standing’?
Legal standing is the right to act in a court of law. In the legal profession, this is known as ‘Locus Standi‘.
In other words, if you want to take legal action and appear in court, you must meet the required legal conditions.
If these conditions are met, you can take legal action and have legal standing.
Why is this important?
This is important because if you want to challenge inheritance arrangements, you must demonstrate your legal standing and meet the conditions relating to inheritance disputes.
If you don’t meet these conditions, you legally won’t be able to dispute the inheritance arrangements.
Do I have the right to dispute inheritance?
When representing our clients for inheritance disputes, we first need to establish whether they have legal standing. If they do not, they cannot take legal action.
To do this, we look at different circumstances relating to their relationship to the person who has passed away. These circumstances might include:
- Were you married to them?
- Were they your parent?
- Were you financially dependent on them?
- Are you a direct descendant of them?
- Are you included in their current or previous will?
- How long ago did they pass away?
These are just some of the main issues that dictate whether you have legal standing. The IDR Claim Checker form will give you an immediate answer on your rights to legally dispute inheritance arrangements based on your answers to the questions above.
It may be unclear whether you have legal standing in some circumstances, so your outcome report will be ‘maybe’. In these cases, your circumstances would need further investigation by legal professionals to establish whether you have the right to raise a dispute.
This tool will help you understand whether you have legal standing to dispute the current inheritance arrangements and advise on the likelihood of the challenge succeeding. The likelihood of success is also known as ‘merit’.
What does the legal term ‘merit’ mean?
Merit is a legal term referring to the strength or weakness of a legal case.
The Wikipedia definition is:
“In law, merits are the inherent rights and wrongs of a legal case, absent of any emotional or technical bias”.
The exact meaning can be difficult to define for people with no legal experience, but essentially, the more merit, the stronger a case will be and the more likely a successful outcome will be. When a judgment, decision, or ruling is made, it is based on the case’s merit.
What does ‘merit’ have to do with challenging inheritance arrangements?
An example of merit relating to inheritance disputes could be explained with the child of someone who has died:
- If it is an adult child with an established life and income living independently from their parent, they may well have legal standing. Still, they will have far less merit than a child under 18 who lived on the property of the deceased person and relied entirely on their financial support.
- The courts would judge the adult child with their income less favourably than the younger, more dependent child. Any court financial award would likely be less for the older child and more for the child under 18.
Another example could be a spouse:
- A person who was married and living with the deceased person for two years would have much less merit than a person who had been married and living together for thirty years.
How can ‘merit’ be established?
Inheritance disputes vary widely, and the merit of any case requires careful examination by legal professionals.
Based on the answers to your questions, your outcome report breaks down the key issues relating to your circumstances and indicates the likely strengths and weaknesses of each issue.
The strengths and weaknesses of each issue are assessed with a traffic light system:
- Green is for circumstances that would likely strengthen the merit of your case, red is for circumstances that would weaken the merit, and yellow is for circumstances that may be unclear and require further assessment of the details.