Wills are a fixture of practice life. Yet for many sole practitioners and small private client firms, the value held within a will bank is not always fully appreciated as an asset – at retirement, in a merger or acquisition, or simply as an untapped source of private client revenue.
A will bank is not a pile of paper. It is a database of client relationships, each representing a future fee event. The nature and timing of that event varies – for some, the fee opportunity is purely upfront when a will is written. For others, there are multiple touchpoints before probate: LPA preparation, trust reviews, estate planning updates and IHT advice. Every will in storage is a client relationship with ongoing commercial value.
Will banks: an increasingly sought-after asset.
The will bank market remains less routinely approached with the same financial rigour applied to other legal sector transactions – law firm mergers and acquisitions or practice area divestures, for example, where traditional valuation techniques hold. Will banks were once seldom thought of as something to be sold – and when retirement or restructuring arrived, they were frequently treated as an afterthought.
Now firms are thinking differently. Estate planning platforms and private client consolidators are actively acquiring will banks, understanding something many individual practitioners do not: a well-maintained, properly valued will bank commands a meaningful price in an increasingly active market.
Moreover, as the market matures, a more standardised approach to valuation is emerging. Will bank pricing is moving toward greater consistency. Buyers and sellers will increasingly be able to approach transactions with shared reference points, giving practitioners the confidence to assign meaningful, defensible values to their will banks rather than relying on informal estimates.
Enhancing the value of your will bank.
A will bank of 2,000 files sounds straightforward until you ask the obvious questions. How many of those testators are still alive? How many have moved since the will was signed? How many wills remain legally valid – not superseded by a subsequent will, a marriage or a divorce? How many are in a format a buyer can actually use?
To position a will bank effectively for sale, clarity is needed across three areas:
- Active wills: Cross-referencing testator records against public death registrations to identify deceased individuals, tracing those who have moved and verifying current contact details.
- Digitisation: Standardising and digitising the dataset to create a clean, usable digital record from physical files.
- Estate value mapping: Cross-referencing against public records – Land Registry, Companies House, the Probate Registry – to build a picture of each testator’s likely estate value.
This methodical approach turns a subjective asset into a priceable one – removing the information asymmetry between seller and buyer and giving both parties a credible basis for negotiation.
In practice, the cleansing and validation process requires access to specialist data sources and expertise that most practitioners do not hold in-house or takes away resources from fee earners. Where a specialist carries out this work – and bears the cost of doing so – the improvement in sale price typically exceeds that cost many times over. The seller receives a better outcome without any financial outlay.
Who is buying will banks?
Estate planning businesses, private client consolidators and specialist platforms are actively seeking validated will banks. For a buyer, a validated will bank is one of the most efficient client acquisition routes available – the clients come with a warm introduction from the outgoing firm, an existing relationship and an expected future fee profile.
Pricing varies considerably by size, quality and geography. A well-maintained, digitised bank commands a higher price per validated will than a disorganised paper-based one. Validated, well-presented will banks are attracting genuine competitive interest and achieving prices that would surprise many practitioners who have never considered the asset in commercial terms.
What should practitioners do?
Three practical steps for anyone approaching retirement or considering the future of their private client practice.
Start thinking of the will bank as an asset now, not at retirement or sale. A well-maintained bank commands a higher price than a neglected one. Regular client contact, updated addresses and a clean digital record all add value – and the work is marginal if done consistently rather than in a last-minute scramble.
Understand what you hold before you negotiate. An independent assessment of the validated will count – how many clients are confirmed as live, contactable and holding a legally valid will — is the single most important step in maximising the value of any will bank transaction. Without it, a seller is negotiating blind.
Take succession planning seriously as both a professional obligation and a commercial one. The SRA Code of Conduct 2019 requires practitioners to act in clients’ best interests when ceasing to act. A will bank transferred to an SRA-authorised, actively managed custodian satisfies that obligation far more robustly than one dispersed through an ad hoc wind-down. The commercial and professional interests point in the same direction.
The will bank market is developing. The practitioners who engage with it thoughtfully – who understand what they hold and plan for its transfer as carefully as any other business decision – will achieve outcomes significantly better than those who do not.
About the author
Stephen Fuja is Founder of WeBuyWills, a specialist will bank acquisition business operating across England and Wales. Stephen has spent his career in leveraged finance, private credit and alternative legal asset investment, and established WeBuyWills to apply that experience to an increasingly active and evolving market.
