Larke v Nugus Requests: The Strongest Defence of a Will Is Built Long Before Any Dispute

When a will is challenged, the document itself is rarely the thing that decides the outcome.

What decides it is everything that surrounds the will: the attendance notes, the instructions, the correspondence, the record of who was in the room, the reasons a client departed from an earlier pattern, and the evidence that the person understood what they were doing. For many firms, a challenge means going back years to reconstruct that picture from archived files, departed fee earners, and systems that were never designed to produce evidence.

A Larke v Nugus request is usually the moment that reconstruction begins. And by then, the quality of the answer has already been determined — not by how hard the firm searches, but by how well the relationship was recorded while the client was alive.

This is the uncomfortable truth at the centre of contentious probate: the best time to defend a will is before anyone thinks to attack it.

What is a Larke v Nugus letter?

A Larke v Nugus letter (also called a Larke v Nugus request) is a formal request for information sent to the solicitor or firm that prepared a will, asking them to explain the circumstances in which it was drafted and executed. It is a pre-action tool: it lets interested parties understand how a will came to be made before deciding whether to commit to costly litigation.

The practice has deep roots. The Law Society first recommended, back in 1959, that where litigation over a will is in prospect, the people who prepared it should give full and frank information about how it came to be made, so that unnecessary disputes could be avoided. That principle was tested and endorsed by the Court of Appeal in Larke v Nugus in 1979 (later reported at [2000] WTLR 1033), where executors were criticised for failing to provide information about a will whose validity was in question. The name stuck, and the request became a fixture of private client practice.

The Law Society's current framework sits in its Disputed Wills: Guidance for Practitioners, first issued in December 2019 and updated most recently on 5 September 2023. It sets out who can authorise disclosure, what should be disclosed, and how to handle the confidentiality and privilege issues that a request engages.

A typical request — the standard form is maintained by the Association of Contentious Trust and Probate Specialists (ACTAPS) — asks the drafting solicitor to explain, among other things:

• how well they knew the deceased, and how and when instructions were received;
• whether instructions came by letter or in a meeting, with copies of any correspondence and contemporaneous attendance notes, including where the meeting took place and who else was present;
• what indicated that the deceased knew they were making a will, and how the solicitor satisfied themselves the contents were understood;
• whether there were any signs of confusion or memory loss, or any relevant medical history bearing on capacity;
• how the new will departed from earlier wills, and why;
• who was present at execution, and how it was carried out.

Alongside the answers, the request will usually seek the will file itself, previous testamentary documents, a schedule of assets and liabilities, and the relevant inheritance tax account (IHT400).

Each case differs, but the purpose is constant: to establish whether the will genuinely reflects the settled, informed intentions of the person who made it.

Firms cannot afford to get the response wrong (and the courts have said so)

For years, practitioners treated the "duty" to respond as a soft one. Strictly, there is no statutory or regulatory rule that compels a reply. But the risk in treating a Larke v Nugus request casually has never been clearer than it is now.

The consequences are twofold. First, failing to reply to a proper request has long been regarded as a breach of professional duty capable of attracting a wasted costs order against the solicitor personally — the firm carries a duty to help avoid unnecessary litigation, and stonewalling defeats that. Second, a recent High Court decision has put concrete numbers and pointed judicial language around the point.

In Addison & Anor v Niaz (2024), decided by Chief Master Shuman on 5 August 2024, the drafting solicitor took the will instructions and prepared two wills for the deceased — the second changing both the executors and the division of the estate. After the death, a caveat was entered on suspicion of undue influence and lack of capacity, and a Larke v Nugus request followed on 27 March 2023. It was then chased repeatedly across April, May and June before a response finally arrived in July — accompanied by the will files and a witness statement, but only after the solicitor had asserted a need for executors' consent and cited personal circumstances for the delay.

The court was unimpressed on two fronts. The substance was inadequate: a short summary that lacked the detail expected, containing inconsistencies between the witness statement and the attendance note that were only resolved when the solicitor was questioned in court under a summons issued under section 122 of the Senior Courts Act 1981. And the delay was, in the court's words, lamentable — it had done nothing to move the parties towards resolution. Costs were awarded against the respondent.

Two lessons land hard for private client firms:

1. Consent is good practice, not a shield. The court confirmed that while seeking an executor's consent is sensible, it is not strictly necessary; a solicitor should generally respond even where consent is withheld, provided the executor is notified in advance. If genuinely uneasy, the solicitor can seek the court's direction under sections 122 or 123 of the Senior Courts Act 1981. Waiting for consent is not a safe reason to sit on a request.
2. A thin, inconsistent response is worse than a slow one. What drew the sharpest criticism was not just timing but quality — a summary that could not be reconciled with the file it was supposed to explain. An inconsistency between a witness statement written years later and an attendance note written at the time is exactly the kind of gap that turns a defensible will into a contested one.

Both failures — the delay and the inconsistency — trace back to the same root cause: a file that did not, on its own, tell a complete and coherent story.

A response is only ever as strong as the file behind it

Here is the practical problem. By the time a request lands, a great deal of time has usually passed. Instructions may have been taken five, ten, or fifteen years earlier. The fee earner who took them may have retired or moved firms. The evidence may be spread across a document management system, an email archive, a physical file in storage, and a few handwritten notes — some of it never intended to be read as evidence in the first place.

A comprehensive response needs to demonstrate that:

• the client's instructions were clear and consistent over time;
• proper procedures were followed and identity was verified;
• meetings happened when and where the file says they did;
• significant decisions — and departures from previous wishes — were documented with reasons;
• communication with the client was appropriate throughout.

Small details that seemed insignificant when they were recorded become decisive years later. A one-line note about who drove the client to the appointment; a reference to a GP letter; a record of why a long-standing beneficiary was removed. The firm that can produce these quickly and consistently is in a completely different position from the firm reconstructing them under pressure.

Testamentary capacity is a mosaic, not a single document

Capacity is the ground on which wills are most often challenged, and it is the area where a well-kept record matters most — because capacity is almost never proved by one piece of paper.

The legal test still traces to Banks v Goodfellow (1870): the testator must understand the nature of making a will and its effects, understand the extent of the property being disposed of, and be able to comprehend and appreciate the claims to which they ought to give effect, with no disorder of the mind perverting their judgement. It is a functional, holistic test — and courts assess it against the whole evidential picture, not a single attendance note.

The so-called golden rule — the guidance from Kenward v Adams (1975) that where a testator is elderly or seriously unwell, capacity should ideally be assessed and recorded by a medical practitioner — remains prudent practice. But the courts have been clear (notably in Burgess v Hawes in the Court of Appeal) that it is guidance, not a rule of law; failing to follow it does not invalidate a will, and following it does not guarantee one. Capacity ultimately falls to be judged on the wider evidence.

That wider evidence is exactly what a rich client record supplies:

• the client's own instructions, in their own words;
• the pattern of their previous estate planning decisions;
• consistency of wishes across years and across advisers;
• medical context, where it exists;
• family and financial circumstances that make the disposition rational and explicable.

When those threads are captured contemporaneously and held together, a firm can show that a decision was informed, rational, and consistent with the client's life. When they are scattered — or missing — even a perfectly valid will can look vulnerable.

The real problem: information is fragmented, and the firm only holds half of it

Modern private client work generates information from many places, and no single party holds all of it.

The firm typically holds the will, the attendance notes, the identity documents, the letters of wishes, any LPAs and trust documentation, and the correspondence. But the client holds the rest — the full financial position, the property details, the pension and insurance arrangements, the family context, the digital assets, and the day-to-day changes in circumstances that never make it into a solicitor's file until the next review, if ever.

When a challenge arrives, building a complete chronology means stitching those two halves back together across inboxes, filing systems, paper archives, and the client's own home — often after the one person who could explain it all has died. That is precisely the reconstruction problem that Addison v Niaz exposed, and precisely the problem that a continuously maintained record is designed to remove.

Build the defence during the relationship, not after death

The firms getting ahead of this are making a simple shift in mindset: from reconstructing a client's picture reactively when a dispute forces the issue, to maintaining it continuously as a natural part of the relationship.

A more complete, continuously updated record helps a firm:

• respond to Larke v Nugus requests quickly, fully, and consistently;
• evidence the reasoning behind advice, and departures from earlier wishes;
• support testamentary capacity through the wider picture, not a single note;
• track changes in family and financial circumstances as they happen;
• support executors after death and reduce time spent hunting for historic documents.

The result is not just better compliance. It is genuine confidence that the firm's records accurately reflect what the client actually wanted — and can prove it.

How Lyfeguard helps

Lyfeguard is a single, secure environment in which a firm and its clients maintain the same living record of a client's important life information — with both sides working inside one controlled platform rather than across disconnected systems.

For legal firms, Lyfeguard provides full document-management functionality: secure storage, role-based access controls, complete audit trails, and retention management — the DMS-equivalent capability a private client practice needs, applied to the will file and everything around it.

For the client, Lyfeguard provides a structured life-context record across six hubs — Personal, Financial, Property, Estate & Legacy, Digital, and Health — maintained continuously and shared with the firm on the client's terms.

That structure maps almost exactly onto the evidence a Larke v Nugus response has to assemble:

• Personal and Health hold the family context and, where it exists, the medical picture relevant to capacity.
• Financial and Property hold the assets, liabilities, and understanding of the estate that go to the Banks v Goodfellow test.
• Estate & Legacy holds the wills, letters of wishes, LPAs, and trust documents — and the trail of how and why they changed.
• Digital captures the assets that are so easily overlooked until they are disputed.

Because both the firm and the client operate within the same controlled environment, with consent-based visibility and a full audit trail, the record is not a client-side scrapbook sitting alongside the firm's file — it is part of the firm's evidential picture, kept current throughout the relationship rather than rebuilt after death. So when a request arrives years later, the firm is not reconstructing a life from disconnected records under a chasing letter. It is drawing on a complete, contemporaneous, access-controlled record it has helped maintain all along — the difference, in practice, between the response that resolves a dispute and the one that starts one.

Key takeaways

• A Larke v Nugus request asks the drafting firm to explain how a will was made; the answer's strength depends entirely on the file behind it.
• There is no strict legal duty to respond, but Addison v Niaz (2024) confirms that delay and inadequate, inconsistent responses carry real cost and reputational consequences — and can attract adverse costs orders.
• Consent from executors is good practice, not a precondition; solicitors should generally respond regardless, with notice.
• Testamentary capacity is judged on the whole picture under Banks v Goodfellow, not a single document — so a rich, contemporaneous record is a firm's best evidence.
• The strongest defensible record is built continuously during the relationship, in one controlled environment shared by firm and client — not reconstructed after death.

This article is general information for professionals, not legal advice, and does not create a solicitor–client relationship. Firms should apply the current Law Society Disputed Wills guidance and take their own advice on specific matters.