When a signed Will still fails: the lesson of Ugolor v Ugolor

A Will can be signed, witnessed and perfectly regular on its face — and still fail. Not because the person who made it lacked the mental capacity to do so, and not because anyone stood over them with a pen. It can fail simply because the court is not satisfied that they understood and approved what was in it.

That is the quiet lesson of Ugolor v Ugolor [2026] EWHC 745 (Ch), a Chancery Division judgment handed down on 7 March 2026. It is a case every business owner and property investor should read about, because it turns on something most people never think about when they sit down to write their own Will at the kitchen table.

What happened

Pamela Ayodele Festous died on 21 March 2020. She left a homemade Will dated 21 March 2008, which named one of her sons as executor and main beneficiary, with a legacy of £100,000 to be held on trust for adopted children. Other children — his siblings, who brought the claim — were left nothing.

They challenged the Will on three grounds: lack of testamentary capacity, undue influence, and want of knowledge and approval. Only the third succeeded.

There was an unusual procedural wrinkle. The main beneficiary had been debarred from defending, following significant and continuing non-compliance with interim orders. In most civil claims that would be the end of the argument. But in a probate claim the court cannot simply hand down a default judgment. Where the validity of a Will is challenged, the court performs an inquisitorial function, not an adversarial one. The judge still had to decide, on all the material before him, whether the 2008 Will was valid — even with only one side present.

What knowledge and approval actually means

English law starts from a sensible presumption: a Will that is regular on its face should be treated as valid unless a court is satisfied it should be set aside on a recognised ground. Three grounds were live here.

• Testamentary capacity — did the person understand what they were doing at the time they made the Will?
• Knowledge and approval — did they understand the effect of the document they were signing?
• Undue influence — were they coerced into signing it?

Those are three different questions, and they are not equally easy to prove. Capacity turns on medical evidence and is often finely balanced. Undue influence in the Will context requires proof of actual coercion, which is a famously high bar — the pressure has to overpower the person’s own wishes, and it is rarely captured in writing.

Knowledge and approval sits between them. It asks whether this person really understood this document. Where the circumstances of the drafting excite suspicion, the burden of proof shifts, and it falls to the person putting the Will forward to satisfy the court that it genuinely reflected the testator’s mind.

Why the Will failed

The judge found the 2008 Will had plainly been prepared by the son who benefited from it, and the drafting gave it away.

The Will used his formal first name throughout — yet his mother had never called him that. She used two other names for him. A document she had supposedly written herself referred to her own son in a way she never did in life.

The Will was also written in complex legal terminology that she was most unlikely to have produced herself. Language matters. A homemade document that suddenly reads like a solicitor’s precedent invites the obvious question: whose words are these?

Then there was the shape of the gifts. She was disinheriting children she had raised, while leaving a substantial legacy to people she had had no knowledge of for decades. That is not, by itself, unlawful — people are free to make surprising Wills. But it needs explaining, and no one was there to explain it. The court also found it suspicious that the main beneficiary had pressed on to obtain probate knowing a challenge to the Will was outstanding.

Notably, the other two grounds failed. Pamela did suffer from delusions, but the judge held they did not go to testamentary capacity. She had also omitted a Nigerian property from the Will — and forgetting a particular asset, especially one of no great value, is not of itself proof of incapacity. On undue influence, there was no sufficient evidence of actual coercion; the judge reasoned that had she been compelled to disinherit her daughters against her wishes, she would likely have said so during their later visits to her nursing home.

Costs were awarded on the indemnity basis against the main beneficiary, because of the persistent non-compliance with court orders. That is the harsher basis, and it is a reminder that how a party conducts litigation carries its own price.

A worked example

Take a Worthing couple — call them Raymond and Delia, invented purely as illustration. Raymond owns a small engineering firm and two rental flats. He has three grown children. One of them, the eldest, lives nearby and helps with the books.

Raymond decides a Will is a simple thing. The eldest downloads a template, types it up “to save Dad the bother”, uses formal language pulled from an internet example, and leaves the business to himself because he is the one who works in it. Raymond signs it in front of two neighbours. Everything looks tidy.

Ten years later Raymond dies. The other two children look at the Will, notice it was written by the brother who inherits the firm, notice it does not sound remotely like their father, and ask a solicitor. There is no independent record of what Raymond was told, what he understood about the value of the business, or whether he grasped that his other two children were receiving almost nothing.

Nobody has to prove that the eldest bullied his father. That is the point of Ugolor. They only have to raise enough suspicion about the circumstances of the drafting to shift the burden — and then the brother has to prove his father knew and approved of every part of it. Ten years on, with the only witness gone, that can be very hard.

The traps

• A beneficiary doing the typing. Kindness and self-interest look identical on paper. Once a beneficiary has drafted or substantially shaped a Will, suspicion attaches to it.
• Borrowed legal language. Clauses lifted from a template that the person could never have written themselves are evidence, not reassurance.
• No record of the conversation. Homemade Wills produce no file note, no record of instructions taken, no evidence of what was read back and explained.
• Unexplained departures. Leaving out a child, or favouring one who runs the business, is entirely permissible — but the reasoning needs to be recorded at the time, by someone independent.
• Business assets treated casually. With the £2.5m combined cap on Business Relief and Agricultural Property Relief from April 2026, and 50% relief above it, the drafting of business gifts has real tax consequences as well as validity ones.
• Litigation is expensive. Contested probate consumes estates. And from 13 July 2026 the probate application fee itself rose to £526 — a small figure beside legal fees in a dispute like this one.

What to do

The practical answer is not complicated. Have your Will prepared by someone independent who takes your instructions from you directly, in your own words, and keeps a record of doing so.

Instructions should be given by you and not relayed through the person who benefits. Where a family member is helping with transport or paperwork, the drafter should still take instructions privately. If your Will does something that will surprise people — favouring the child who runs the company, or leaving a property outside the family line — say why at the time, on the record.

Business owners have a further reason for care. The value in a trading company, the shareholders’ agreement, and the way shares pass on death all interact with Business Relief and with the £1m Business Asset Disposal Relief lifetime limit. Wording that is loose enough to be argued over is wording that can forfeit relief as well as goodwill.

In short

Capacity and undue influence are the dramatic grounds. Knowledge and approval is the quieter one — and, as Ugolor shows, frequently the more winnable. The best defence against it is unglamorous: independent drafting, clear language the testator would recognise as their own, and a contemporaneous record of what was explained and understood.

If you would like to talk through how your own arrangements would stand up to scrutiny — particularly where a business or rental property is involved — book a Discovery Call. It runs 30 minutes, the fee is £30, and it is credited against your fees if you go on to instruct us.