It wasn’t until Charlotte’s* father died that she learnt he had changed his will to leave his entire estate to one of her three siblings.
“This is crazy,” she remembers thinking in the days afterwards. “Why wouldn’t we get anything? This just makes no sense.”
She and two siblings contested; mediation collapsed. They eventually settled out of court, with the three ousted siblings dividing a minority portion of the estate. They have not spoken to the other sibling since.
It stung that Charlotte, who was in her late 50s, divorced and did not own property, was neither well off nor able to pass on any inheritance to her own children. But what confused her most of all was how to reframe her relationship with her late father.
“What value did we have, and what responsibility did he have towards us?” she says. “You find yourself going over old letters and rummaging through the past, trying to create meaning.”
There are few parts of the law that are quite as incendiary, emotional and steeped in messy human connection as succession. In court, disputes about wills are notoriously hard to predict. But even in this discretionary and fast-evolving area of law, some clear new patterns are emerging.
The silent generation and baby boomers hold $5.4tn in assets that will over the next 20 years pass to their descendants. The “great wealth transfer” is under way and, with a population bulge that’s nearing life expectancy and loaded with property and superannuation wealth, combined with more blended and non-nuclear families than ever before, wrangles over wills are becoming more common.
New South Wales supreme court data show there were 104 court-annexed mediations in succession and probate cases in 2021. In 2025, there were 735. Over the same time, filings in succession and probate rose from 1,168 to 1,467.
The vast majority of wills land gently, with estates passed quietly on to beneficiaries. It’s the outliers that cross the desk of Prue Vines, a University of New South Wales law professor and an expert in succession.
“There can be absolutely horrendous family disputes, and they’re always awful when you see them – but, of course, that’s what we see,” she says. She first observed a rise in the number of disputes about wills 30 years ago. But it’s today’s eye-watering house prices and deepening inequality that seem to be raising the stakes well beyond the family heirlooms.
In 2024, JBWere found that Australians receive an average $706,806 inheritance, most commonly between the ages of 55 and 59, according to the Productivity Commission. That kind of windfall might mean a stab at home ownership and financial security in a society in which wealth is ever more concentrated. Getting a foot on to the property ladder is increasingly reliant on a parent’s wealth, before or after their deaths.
Sign up: AU Breaking News emailThe effect is what Adeline Schiralli, special counsel at Southern Waters Legal and a specialist in wills and estates, calls inheritance impatience – and it is playing out across socioeconomic groups. “I’ve seen very, very small estates where there have been disputes,” she says. “It’s more about the circumstances of the individuals bringing the claims.”
Those people may be acting on a kind of survival instinct, suggests Charlotte, as she looks for her own answers. “We’ve set up a society whereby money matters so much, a house matters so much, that you can’t see others’ needs,” she says.
“It just purely, simply comes down to greed for me. And I think you can hide greed under, ‘Well, this is Mum’s or Dad’s wishes. This is what they wanted.’”
For Mary-Ann de Mestre, a convener of succession law at Macquarie University and founder of M de Mestre Lawyers, an ageing population, complex estate structures and cost-of-living pressures have created “a perfect storm where everyone is trying a different way to get their inheritance”.
“Inheritance disputes aren’t just increasing, they’re becoming more complex, more emotional,” she says.
Remarriages and non-nuclear families are testing the boundaries of dependence and lineage, while with ageing can come the possibility of dementia and clashes about wills that take aim at the cognition of the testate.
Technology is also creating curveballs in court, with text messages and digital notes submitted as evidence of a dead person’s intentions and a booming online industry of AI-generated wills that are unable to comprehensively assess someone’s mental capacity and independence as they formalise their last wishes.
At De Mestre’s practice in Sydney’s northern beaches – where the interior is decorated in calming white and green – she sees clients investing time and energy into tidying up their estates well before they die as much as they do in preparing affairs for afterwards – known as “pre-planning,” and “post-planning”. Here, death is less an ending than a point on a timeline – and money has an afterlife.
‘A grief process layered with conflict’
De Mestre has observed more cases involving promissory estoppel – an informal promise that is relied upon after death. “I was promised the business and it’s now going to everyone,” is a typical scenario. But there are other terms on which wills are being challenged at increasing rates.
Vines senses people are “more likely to think ‘I’m entitled to get property from my parents’ than they used to be”. She admits that she is “a bit impatient” with well-off people in their 60s who want to fight about their late parents not bequeathing them money.
It is the court’s job to supervise fairness in such cases. There, testamentary freedom – the right to choose who inherits your property – is balanced with moral responsibility, or the duty to provide for family and dependants.
Family provision legislation, created to protect widows and children after the death of husbands, has expanded to the point that South Australia now recognises stepchildren as eligible applicants. De Mestre has seen an uptick in stepchildren, adult children and second partners making claims on wills because they feel unfairly done by. “What originally was your will and your wishes is now open slather, almost,” she says.
To dissuade some of the wilder claims on an inheritance, there are now repercussions for mounting a family provision case that doesn’t have reasonable prospects – including, in the past 12 months, findings that demonstrate estates will no longer always cover the costs of legal action, and cost-capping. Mediation is mandatory in family provision cases in NSW.
De Mestre tends to set up client family meetings to explain that an expected inheritance is not a fixed entitlement; what one might receive from a will is “forever fluid”.
“A recurring theme is surprise,” she says. “People are often shocked to discover that a will is not the final word, it is frequently just the opening move.”
She tells them: “If you get something, you’re lucky and you should accept it.”
Her clients generally fall into two categories – those who come to realise they don’t have the stomach to go ahead with litigation, and those who, out of principle, feel that something needs to be done.
“I often tell clients, ‘This is not just a legal process, it is a grief process layered with conflict.’ These cases are rarely about greed – they are about recognition, hurt, and unfinished family business.”
‘Everything went to hell in a handbasket’
Then there are the many post-will family breakdowns that never make it to solicitors’ offices. One case is that of Frankie*, who cut ties with her sister after her mother’s decision to apportion 75% of her $20,000 estate to her sister and the remainder to her.
It was never about the money, she says, but the way her mother’s wishes were mishandled – drawn up using a cheap will kit that left more questions than answers – that really hurt.
“Everything went to hell in a handbasket because my mum didn’t want to pay for legal advice,” she says. “It was horrific.”
Time and time again, Vines has seen distressed, grief-stricken siblings making decisions in the heat of the moment.
“All of their sibling rivalry, from when they were two, three, five, 10, 25 – all of that floods out,” she says.” So they’d go into litigation and, next thing, the whole family is destroyed.
“If we could stop people making the decision about suing close to the time that people had died, we might do better.”
It might help, too, if relatives on the brink of an inheritance quarrel could sit in on a meeting between a probate judge and sparring parties before a hearing, as Vines has done. She watched as the judge asked the counsel to run through the costs of the case, reaching about $90,000 for a matter that involved a three-day hearing. It mightn’t have been a popular tactic among barristers but that particular judge had a high settlement rate.
It’s possible, she reasons, that younger generations’ openness around the taboo of inheritance – that is, talking to one another before dying – may head off some disputes but “you’re never going to fix really super dysfunctional families”.
Perhaps being clear about expectations, intentions and the value of relationships is best done when alive. Grudges may be taken to the grave but it’s the living who have to deal with their fallout.
Rachel* and her two sisters foresaw the prospect of a family imbroglio when their mother, in her 90s, began to agitate to cut her only son out of her will. The extra money would have helped Rachel’s family but also would have come at too high a cost.
“We thought it was unfair,” says Rachel, who is in her 60s and is from Sydney. “He’d be devastated, he didn’t really understand the depth of what she felt about him. She’d be gone and the living would have to deal with the consequences.”
Their mother eventually dropped the idea.
“We will never tell him. He would be really, really, really upset. Writing one of your children out of your will is really difficult – the message it sends is horrendous.”
*Names have been changed
