Contested probate is the most valuable work most private client firms never market

Why does nobody market contested probate?

It falls between two teams, and neither one owns it.

Private client departments know probate procedure but avoid contentious work. Civil litigators know how to run a claim but are unfamiliar with probate practice. A firm that genuinely does both holds a real differentiator and usually buries it inside a wills and probate service page.

The result is that enquiries for contested estates land wherever a search happens to send them, rather than with the firms best equipped to handle them.

What is a contested estate worth to the firm?

Materially more than the private client work sitting next to it.

Negotiated resolutions in England and Wales sit in the region of five to fifteen thousand pounds per side. Matters that reach trial run from thirty thousand to well over a hundred thousand. A single instructed matter can be worth more than a year of straightforward will drafting.

Costs are recoverable from the estate in many circumstances, which changes the client conversation entirely and makes the work more accessible than clients assume.

Conditional and damages-based fee agreements are increasingly used for will challenges, another sign the market is maturing rather than static.

Who is actually searching for this?

Not lawyers. Beneficiaries, and they use none of your vocabulary.

Nobody types contentious probate into a search bar. They type variations of whether they can challenge a will, what happens when an executor will not communicate, or whether a sibling can be removed as executor. The gap between how firms describe the service and how the public describes the problem is where the enquiries leak away.

They arrive with a family dispute, not a legal category. The page that wins is the one that names their situation before it names the practice area.

What does the SRA allow you to say?

More than most firms use, provided the claims survive scrutiny.

SRA rules on publicity require that it is not misleading. Where a firm falls under the Transparency Rules for a defined service, price and service information must be published. Contentious probate generally sits outside those defined categories, which gives more latitude on how fees are presented, and makes clarity a competitive advantage rather than an obligation.

The December 2024 SRA warning notice on marketing to members of the public is worth reading before writing anything. It covers misleading success claims, hidden fee arrangements, pressure tactics, and the firm’s responsibility for third parties running marketing on its behalf.

How would you build the funnel?

Separate it from the wills page, and qualify before a fee earner spends time.

Contentious enquiries need different creative, different search terms and a different cost ceiling from will drafting. Pooling them into one private client campaign hides the economics of both.

Then grade. An enquiry about a disputed estate is not automatically viable. Estate value, limitation periods, the strength of the grounds and whether the other side has already instructed all determine whether the matter is worth a fee earner’s hours. Grading before the first call is what stops a high-value practice area from becoming a time sink.

What we would look at first

Three things.

Whether contentious probate has its own page, its own campaign and its own cost ceiling, or is buried in private client. Whether enquiries are graded on estate value and limitation before a fee earner responds. And whether anyone can tell you what an instructed contentious matter costs to acquire, as opposed to what an enquiry costs.