Two High Court decisions handed down within a few months of each other have sent a clear signal to anyone thinking about challenging a Will: if you wait too long, the court may refuse to hear you at all, however strong your case might once have been. The lead decision, Stephenson v Daley [2026] EWHC 53 (Ch), together with Bowerman v Bowerman [2025] EWHC 2947 (Ch), sets out — again — just how far a family dispute can run before the doctrine of laches steps in and closes the door.
What laches actually means
Laches is an old equitable principle, not a modern invention. In plain English, it says that a court can refuse a claim if the person bringing it has delayed so long, and in circumstances so unfair to the other side, that it would now be wrong to let the case proceed — even if the underlying claim might otherwise have merit. It is not a fixed time limit like the six-year period for a debt claim. There is no calendar date after which a challenge to a Will automatically expires. Instead, a judge looks at the whole picture: how long the delay was, whether the challenger knew, or could reasonably have found out, the facts they needed, whether the other side has acted in reliance on the Will in the meantime, and whether it would now be unjust to reopen matters.
That flexibility is precisely why laches has felt, for years, like a slow-burning risk rather than a real deterrent. Families involved in a Will dispute sometimes assume there is effectively no rush — that so long as nobody has yet spent the inheritance, the argument can wait until tempers cool, funds allow, or evidence falls into place. Stephenson v Daley and Bowerman v Bowerman both push back against that assumption.
The facts of Stephenson v Daley
The case concerned the 2016 Will of Elaine Reid, who left her estate to her partner rather than to her sons. The sons challenged the Will on the grounds of want of knowledge and approval — arguing, in short, that their mother had not properly understood or approved its contents. The claimants sought to have the 2016 Will admitted to probate in solemn form.
The court dismissed the sons’ challenge on its merits. But it went further, holding that the challenge was also barred by laches. The judge found that the sons had delayed roughly seven and a half years after they had the information they needed to bring a claim, and that this delay — set against the wider circumstances — meant it would be unjust to allow the challenge to proceed at all. Probate in solemn form of the 2016 Will was granted to the claimants, and the counterclaim was dismissed.
Bowerman v Bowerman: an even longer delay
Bowerman v Bowerman, decided a little earlier, tells a similar story on a longer timescale. There, a delay of some eighteen and a half years in bringing a challenge was found to be too long, and the claim was barred by laches. The judgment applied the established four propositions on delay set out in the earlier case of James v Scudamore, reinforcing that the courts will look closely at how long a family member sat on a known grievance before acting on it.
Read together, the two cases show the same reasoning applied at very different points on the timeline — a matter of years in one case, close to two decades in the other. The common thread is not a specific number of years, but the courts’ evident discomfort with claims that surface long after the facts were known and long after the estate has been administered and distributed on the strength of the Will as it stood.
Why probate claims used to feel open-ended
Unlike many areas of civil law, there is no strict limitation period for challenging the validity of a Will on grounds such as lack of capacity, want of knowledge and approval, undue influence, or improper execution. That absence of a hard deadline has understandably led some families to treat a Will dispute as something that can be picked up whenever it suits — after grief has settled, after other litigation has concluded, or after money has been found for legal advice. Stephenson v Daley and Bowerman v Bowerman make clear that this is a misreading of the position. The lack of a fixed limitation period does not mean delay is free of consequence. It simply means the consequence is decided case by case, through the flexible and fact-sensitive lens of laches — and the courts are now applying that lens with real bite.
The role of a Larke v Nugus request
Both cases sit against a well-established piece of procedure that anyone contemplating a Will challenge should understand: the Larke v Nugus request. Named after a 1979 case, this is a formal letter sent to the solicitor who drafted the disputed Will, asking them to set out what they recall and what their file shows about the circumstances of its preparation and execution — who gave instructions, what checks were made on capacity and understanding, and how the signing was witnessed.
A prompt, well-handled Larke v Nugus request often resolves a dispute before it reaches court, one way or the other. If the solicitor’s file shows a careful, properly recorded process, a challenge frequently loses its footing early. If it reveals gaps, a genuine dispute may be justified. Either way, the request depends on the solicitor’s memory and file still being available and reliable — which is another reason delay is corrosive. The longer a family waits, the harder it becomes to reconstruct exactly what happened in the room when the Will was signed, and the weaker the evidence on both sides becomes.
The practical lesson, for both sides
For a beneficiary, or someone who believes they have been unfairly left out, with a genuine concern about a Will, the lesson from these two cases is straightforward: act promptly. If something about how a Will was made troubles you, gather the facts, take advice, and consider a Larke v Nugus request early rather than waiting to see how things settle. The longer a concern is left unaddressed, the greater the risk that a court will treat the delay itself as fatal to the claim, regardless of its underlying merits.
For everyone else — the majority of families who simply want their wishes to be followed without dispute — the lesson is different but equally important. The best protection against a challenge ever gaining traction is a Will that was properly drafted, properly witnessed, and properly evidenced at the time it was made. A solicitor who takes clear instructions, makes a considered assessment of understanding, keeps a thorough file note, and follows correct execution formalities gives a future Larke v Nugus request very little to work with. That is not a guarantee no one will ever raise a query — families are complicated, and disappointment does not always listen to reason — but it means a challenge, if one is ever threatened, has nowhere to go.
What this looks like in practice
It is worth being precise about what these cases do and do not decide. Neither Stephenson v Daley nor Bowerman v Bowerman sets a bright-line rule that a claim brought after, say, five years is automatically doomed and one brought after four is safe. Laches remains a fact-sensitive doctrine. A court will still ask why the delay happened — whether a claimant genuinely did not have the information needed to bring a claim, whether they were pursuing other reasonable steps in the meantime, and whether the delay has caused real prejudice to the other side, such as an estate being distributed and spent, or a key witness’s memory fading. A short delay explained by genuine and reasonable circumstances is treated very differently from a long delay with no good explanation.
What has changed is the tone. Judges in both cases were willing to give real weight to delay as an independent bar to a claim, not merely as a factor that makes an otherwise weak case weaker. That is a useful corrective for families who have heard, correctly, that there is no strict limitation period for a Will challenge, and have concluded, incorrectly, that timing therefore does not matter.
What this means going forward
Stephenson v Daley and Bowerman v Bowerman are not a change in the law of laches so much as a reminder of how it works in practice, applied with evident firmness by the High Court. Neither case sets a new fixed cut-off, and it would be wrong to read them as establishing that any particular number of years is automatically too long. What they confirm is that the courts are willing to treat significant delay as decisive, on its own facts, and that families on both sides of a potential dispute should plan accordingly — one side by acting without unnecessary delay, and the other by making sure the Will itself was built to withstand scrutiny from the outset.