What Our British Wills & Probate Awards Finalist
Place Means to Us
Secure Inheritance Legal Services has been named a finalist at The British Wills & Probate Awards 2026 in the category Estate Planning Firm of the Year, Boutique.
That’s a lovely thing for the team. But we don’t want to turn this into one of those award announcements that says very little beyond “look at us”. People don’t come to us because of awards. They come to us because they need help with something personal, awkward, important, or long overdue. They might need a Will, an LPA, trust planning, probate support, or simply a conversation about what they should have in place and where to start.
Still, being named a finalist does make you stop and reflect, which is useful in a busy business. You look at what the team has built, what clients have trusted us with, and whether the standards we talk about are showing up in the way the work is done.
Why completion matters in estate planning
For us, the thing that matters most is completion. That might sound quite simple given what we do. But in our award entry, we described Secure Inheritance as operating a strict completion model, which means we don’t treat the job as finished until documents are correctly signed, witnessed, and safely stored.
And it’s important because estate planning isn’t really complete when a document has been drafted. It’s complete when the protection is properly in place. And not all firms do that.
A Will that’s written but never signed properly can create problems later. An LPA that’s discussed but not registered may not help when the family needs it. Documents that are posted out and then left in a drawer, unsigned or witnessed incorrectly, can leave people thinking they’re protected when they aren’t.
We don’t like that one bit.
Advice should fit the person in front of us
When clients come to us, they’re often talking about things they may have put off for years. Sometimes they know exactly what they want. Quite often, once we talk properly, there’s more to think about than they first realised.
That doesn’t mean making everything complicated. It means we do what we do best and listen properly before recommending anything.
Some clients need something straightforward. Others need more care because there’s a second marriage, children from a previous relationship, a vulnerable relative, family money, property ownership, care decisions, or old planning that no longer fits their life now. The work has to fit the person in front of us, otherwise the advice becomes too easy to say and too risky to rely on.
Plain English matters in estate planning
Plain English matters too.
Estate planning can make people feel as though they should already understand things they’ve never had to deal with before. Specialist language like trusts, executors, attorneys, probate, tenants in common, inheritance, storage, registration, signing and witnessing can all start to feel confusing, and people either nod along and hope it makes sense later, or they leave it for another day.
So, we try to explain things in a way people understand. A client should be able to say, “I don’t understand that” without embarrassment and have it explained again properly. They should know what they’re signing, why it matters, what happens next, and what still needs to be done before everything is complete.
What sits behind our finalist place
The award entry included some of the numbers behind the business, including 15% year-on-year client growth, more than 12,000 clients protected, and 90% of Will clients also choosing to put Lasting Powers of Attorney in place.
Those numbers are encouraging, of course they are. But the part we care about is what they suggest about the way people experience the service. We are 5* rated on Trustpilot across 615 unprompted reviews, with 98% five-star reviews and no review solicitation.
These reviews come from people who have actually been through our process. We’ve also continued to grow our charity work, which is a part of the business we care a great deal about. The award entry referred to our charity partnerships, free Will-writing work, and our involvement as a founding member of the Loving Legacies Foundation, which provides free estate planning support to families with disabled children who couldn’t otherwise afford it.
Keeping families at the centre of estate planning
That work keeps us close to the reason estate planning truly matters in the first place. It’s about families. Sometimes it’s about money, yes. Sometimes it’s about tax, property, documents, legal wording, or making sure the right people have authority at the right time. But underneath all of that, it’s about people wanting to make things easier for the ones they care about.
That’s what we’re trying to protect.
So yes, we’re proud to have been named a finalist. It’s amazing news, and the team deserve to have that recognised. But the award isn’t the thing we want clients to remember most.
We’d rather they remember that they were listened to, that they understood their options, that the process was finished properly, rather than left half done and that they went away clearer than when they started.
That’s the standard we want to keep building.
If you’ve been meaning to review your Will, put LPAs in place, or check whether your existing planning still reflects your life now, we’d love to hear from you.
