You are perfectly entitled to write your children or other close family members out of your will, but such a course can be an invitation to dispute after you are gone. Anne Caswell looks at a High Court case concerning a man who left everything he owned to a close friend, thereby disinheriting his daughter.
The daughter would have been his principal beneficiary under a will he signed four years prior to his death, aged 86. However, a few months before he passed away, he executed a new will in his friend’s favour. The daughter challenged the later will on the basis that her father lacked the mental capacity to make it. Her arguments, however, failed to persuade a district judge.