Wills after divorce: the referral clients don't know they need

A widespread belief among clients, and even some professionals, is that divorce revokes an existing will. It does not. In England and Wales, the grant of decree absolute, or final order, leaves the will standing. What changes is how the will is read: the former spouse is treated as having died before the testator. Any gift to them fails, and any appointment of them as executor no longer takes effect.

This is a narrow and specific rule, and its consequences are easy to underestimate. The will is not cancelled; it is partially disabled. Everything the client arranged that did not depend on the ex-spouse remains in force, while the parts that did fall away, often leaving gaps the client never intended and would be alarmed to discover.

Consider a common arrangement: everything to the spouse, and if the spouse dies first, to the children. After divorce, the ex-spouse is treated as having predeceased, so the estate passes to the children. That might suit the client, or it might not, but it happens by operation of law rather than by choice. Now consider a will that named the former spouse as sole executor with no substitute. That appointment fails, and there may be no one properly appointed to administer the estate.

Guardianship provisions, gifts to the ex-spouse's wider family, and trusts built around the marriage can all be thrown out of alignment. The client believes their affairs are in order because they made a will. In reality the divorce has rewritten it in ways they have never seen and would not have chosen. The result is not a clean cancellation the client can plan around, but a patchwork of surviving and failed provisions that only a specialist review will fully surface.

There is a more urgent window that clients almost never consider. The predeceased treatment only applies once the divorce is final. Until then the client is still legally married, and the existing will, leaving everything to the soon-to-be ex-spouse, remains fully effective. A client who dies during proceedings may pass their entire estate to the person they are actively divorcing.

For a client who has just separated, changed the locks and moved on emotionally, this is a genuinely dangerous gap, and one they will not know exists. The family solicitor is often the only professional positioned to see it, because they know exactly where the client sits in the process. Recognising the exposure and prompting the client to review their will is squarely within the introducer's role.

A family solicitor may spot the problem clearly and still be the wrong person to solve it. Drafting or revising a will, advising on estate structure, and dealing with the interaction between a financial settlement and testamentary wishes is specialist work. Attempting it in passing, as a favour at the end of a matrimonial file, exposes the firm and shortchanges the client.

The right move is to introduce the client to a vetted estate and will specialist who can review the position properly. The solicitor flags the risk, which clients almost always find genuinely useful because no one else has mentioned it, and hands the substantive work to someone qualified to do it. The boundary stays clean: the family solicitor introduces, the specialist advises and drafts.

Because clients never ask for it, the will review only happens if the firm builds it into the process. The natural prompt is the settlement itself: the client's assets have just changed, their family structure has changed, and their existing will almost certainly no longer reflects either. That is the moment to introduce a specialist, while the client is engaged and the relevance is obvious.

A structured referral network makes this effortless. Through SmartPeer the client is introduced to a vetted estate and will specialist, the introduction is logged, and the firm shares in the value it created, typically a 60-70% member share, without stepping into estate advice itself. Because the client rarely knows to ask, the introduction depends entirely on the solicitor raising it, which is exactly why building it into the close matters. A step that clients would never have requested becomes a routine, documented part of closing a divorce, protecting the client from a risk they could not see and quietly strengthening the practice at the same time.