What Happens When a Will Can’t Be Found

It happens more than I would like, but I would probably say only about 20% of my cases do we have knowledge that a will was done and now we can't locate it. What more commonly happens is the person that passed away had indicated, "I did a will. Don't worry, you guys are taken care of," but didn't indicate what attorney, didn't indicate where the will was placed, and so people go in looking for this will and can't find it. So that's typically what I see.

I do have some cases, though, where everybody knows there was a will there, everybody knows where it was, and now one sibling, one friend, one neighbor has gone in the house to secure the house, and now we can't find the will. In those cases, typically there's a copy. Some family member has a copy.

And so we have to go through the probate process and kind of reverse engineer it, where we get in front of a judge and we say, you know, we can't locate the original, but we have a copy. We're not sure if there was an updated one. We don't think it was revoked. And so that kind of takes us into either a regular probate with just an extra step, or that sets us on the path for probate litigation.