Daniel Curran reports on the complexities of cross border searches
Tracing beneficiaries is not only time consuming but fraught with challenges and difficulties, especially where the search for a beneficiary takes the practitioner to beyond the English and Welsh borders. While it may be tempting for a solicitor to resort to online search engines and phone books to begin this process, the likelihood is that they will quickly find themselves in a complicated and tangled web of foreign privacy laws, language barriers and previously undiscovered beneficiaries. These challenges not only result in labour intensive investigations which quickly drain resources, but require specialist expertise in order to trace entitled persons across borders, time zones and jurisdictions.
Scottish & international searches
Unlike English and Welsh intestacy law, in Scotland when a person dies intestate, the estate is distributed according to the eldest degree of kin. Consequently, where there are no surviving aunts, uncles or grandparents, the estate could pass to descendants of great-grandparents, throwing up any number of beneficiaries.
In the event therefore, that a solicitor’s search leads them to Scotland, they could be faced with
