Probate services by Final duties/Lifetime legal

A question about : Probate services by Final duties/Lifetime legal

Story short: Looked around to see if my solicitor was competative and found finalduties.co.uk but in turn wanted to ensuer that they aren;t just a website looking to rip me off.

Any stories good or bad appreciated.

Thanks.

Best answers:

• finalduties looks like a broker.
• Unfortunatly its not a simple estate and although I could do it myself I'm recently in a new role at work which requires home study for qualifications + 2 (young) kids which I dont want to miss out on so I just can't see me having the time to do it.
• I can vouch for Final Duties as I have worked with and for them for the last 4 years.
  We are a broker working with a few selected legal firms (that change from time to time) to handle probate in a cost affective manner.
  The savings you can make will vary depending on the estate size but we always give a price upfront and never charge a percentage of the estate.
• Let me give you the details of my experience as a customer of Final Duties / Lifetime Legal from July 2014 up to the present day.
  My wife and I are expats in Cyprus and when her father died intestate in the UK(don't bother with condolences, he was an evil monster of a human being), we opted to use Final Duties after having read the newspaper article about its founder's own experiences with rip-off probate solicitors and how he wanted to create a service which people could rely on to be fair and efficient.
  The estate had no property, just a few bank accounts/pensions, so wasn't particularly complicated but because we weren't in the UK thought it would be quicker to use a firm to get things done.
  Final Duties then assigned Stephensons Solicitors to handle our probate process.
  This is when it all went fubar'd.
  I'll refrain from posting the full details, suffice to say we received a substandard level of service, replete with "Yes your documents just arrived today", when DHL's tracking had proven delivery actually occurred a few days previously, and plenty of, "We are still waiting on the bank to respond", when the bank in question had a specialist department to handle these matters and a policy of rapid resolution in days, not the months taken by Stephensons to get anywhere and were appalled to hear that they were repeatedly and falsely being blamed by the solicitors for the extended delays in the process.
  Stephensons Solicitors have had the estate funds in their possession now for two weeks and still have not distributed them.
  They had first insisted on waiting until my wife's probate application has been sent to the Probate Office before they would deal with any of the other paperwork concerning the other members of the family, even when they had been repeatedly asked to do so months ago. Then, to top it all, they didn't even do it when the probate application was made. Still didn't do it when the probate was granted and are only now, over two months since they had originally insisted it would be done, getting around to it, in a sort of loosely shambolic approach.
  Just to give you a sense of just how shoddy Stephensons Solictors approach to customer service is, after being passed to them by Final Duties way back in July of last year, I had reason to telephone and enquire as to the status of the process, only to be informed that they needed a form signed by my wife in order to talk to me and that until they had it they were not at liberty to disclose anything. When I pointed out that it was not exactly a positive start to the engagement if they were waiting on a form from us that they hadn't bothered to tell us was needed in the first place, the response I got was a baffling, "Well if you're going to be abusive I am going to end this telephone call".
  There had been nothing abusive about the manner in which I had spoken to the woman. I contacted Final Duties about this disturbing response from Stephensons Solicitors and they assured me it would be looked into.
  I have had need to request Final Duties intervene on a number of occasions and, while the person I am speaking to sounds very sincere about wanting to resolve the problems, not a lot of resolution is taking place and I suspect that my habit of responding to crappy service by pointing out how crappy it is, is likely to cause those supplying it to continue to respond obstructively, as far as the law/excuses can allow them.
  As the months have rolled by, slowly, with little actually taking place in terms of progress, I have found to my surprise that the UK Government's Probate service, as well as large multinational Banks, offer really helpful online and direct guidance and advice on how to go about doing all of this yourself.
  I now wish I had.
  I will reserve my judgement regarding Final Duties until we have finally extracated ourselves from Stephensons Solictors web of incompetence and inefficiency currently trapping us. I only hope Final Duties are able to demonstrate sufficiently proactive a response to our predicament that they reconsider brokering probate work through Stephensons Solicitors ever again.