UK Probate Services – ITC Legal
Probate and will writing companies have been getting a lot of negative press lately for being an unregulated service and for charging the relatives too much for what they provide. I wanted to look into what these probate and will writing services are supposedly doing wrong and who the main culprits are.
Panorama earlier this week reported on the state of the industry and how several unnamed companies had persuaded people in vulnerable states to pay large sums of money, which hadn’t been agreed from the offset. People had been waiting months to receive their relative’s money and were paying a lot for the service.
One company that has been mentioned across the web is ITC Legal Services, one of the UK’s largest probate firms and a provider for thousands of customers. The firm has been in operation for 20 years and is one of the most famous probate providers in the country.
I have seen that some of the negative press towards ITC has been coming from moneysaving expert’s forum. A forum which helps users get good deals and a place for users to discuss the service they have received from companies they have been in contact with. Several users on the forum have posted negative comments around the firm and mainly around the long waiting times and the high cost for the service (which wasn’t mentioned to the potential customer beforehand). Users such as Angrygirlie and portlandboy have been sharing views and tracking the company’s changes over the past several months, however they still have a sour taste in their mouths from their experience with the company.
Survey company “which?” has wrote an article about the state of probate and found that ITC were in fact one of the cheapest providers for the service with other companies and solicitors charging more for the service. This seems to be the opposite of what the forum members have mentioned. Although this may be due to the recent changes the company has made.
Compared to the amount of people ITC must be serving each month, the amount of people complaining is low. However are these people complaining speaking for the many or the few? And is there something that ITC should be doing further to rectify the problems Angrygirlie and the other MSE member have encountered?
Would be great to hear your comments below.
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August 16th, 2010 at 10:52 am
I think that ITC has been getting a lot of negative publicity recently and I’m sure this is a situation where a few bad experiences have tainted the view of the company. I know because I’ve actually used them. I recently had a grandparent pass on and ITC did the probate service. It was all sorted in a relatively short amount of time and there wasn’t any issues. From my experience I can only say great things about the company. If there was an issue before, it’s been sorted out but it may have been a few standout cases, I’m sure every company has a little bad press once in a while.
August 18th, 2010 at 8:25 pm
The CEO of ITC assured me that they only have about 4-5 serious complaints in 100 cases. I would be concerned if, as the largest provider of probate services in the country, 5% of my customers were even slightly disatisfied. These figures must equate to 1,000′s of complaints each year.