Laura McDermott, Senior Case Manager at Kings Court Trust, explains the impact of legal aid funding cuts on claims against estates and what you, as a Will writing professional, can do in order to minimise the risks for your clients.

Cremation is becoming an increasingly common alternative to burial and statistics reveal that 70% of Britons will be cremated rather than buried once they are no longer with us. This has fuelled a rise in the popularity of ash-scattering ceremonies across the country, although few people clearly specify what they want to happen with their remains… and sometimes the ashes are never collected.

Britain is running out of burial space, but the re-use of old graves in the country is still uncommon. In fact, this practice has been strongly restricted in the past 150 years, but recent developments suggest this might be about to change.

Some 30 million accounts on Facebook belong to people who have passed away, but grieving families and friends of just 10% of them make use of the social platform's memorialisation process that essentially locks their account.

Since becoming the first Alternative Business Structure (ABS) licensed for probate by the CLC almost a year ago, Kings Court Trust (KCT) has continued to work closely with all of our Will writing and IFA partners.

Seven million homeowners in the country do not have a Will, so could be exposing their families to substantial financial risk, says a report by Oportfolio.

Did you know that on average a deceased person will continue to receive 80 items of direct mail during the year following their death?

Grief is a natural condition that most people will eventually experience at some stage of their lives when losing someone or something they love, but it can be quite difficult to know how to help children cope with the loss, especially when parents are trying to work through their own bereavement. The organisation Child Bereavement UK is launching a nationwide campaign encouraging teachers to give children lessons on how to overcome grief when the worst happens with a parent or a sibling.

The Legal Services Consumer Panel is determined to keep trying to persuade policymakers that Will writing should be made a reserved legal activity, even though the government decided not the support the idea in May.