Will Drafting to Mitigate Risks and Minimise Challenges – a recorded online conference

Session 1: Testamentary Trusts: Key Risks and Drafting Tips for Variation Clauses

The very nature of testamentary trusts as a long-term repository of family wealth gives rise to complex challenges, particularly in the face of changing circumstances and relationships. This session will focus on the importance of precise drafting of variation clauses and how to avoid the risks that have led to complications and failures in trust deed changes, including:

• Forward planning in trust deed drafting
• Not set in stone: why variation clauses are integral to the trust deed
• Key considerations of content and process in variation clauses
• Consent, death and other stumbling blocks to deed variation
• The consequences of getting it wrong and mechanisms for minimisation of failure
• Drafting tips and examples
• Recent cases

Session 2: The Gifts that Don’t Keep on Giving: Drafting to Minimise Gift Failures in Wills

There can be multiple reasons why specific gifts left in a will can fail, but much of it is avoidable with careful planning and appropriate guidance from practitioners to their clients. This session will examine some common but easily avoidable problems, including:

• Strategies for obtaining and recording comprehensive instructions
• Identify and specify – ensuring precision in identification and details of assets, beneficiaries and specific gifts
• Drafting for change and the importance of regular will reviews
• Common problems and how to avoid them in gifts of shares, real estate and to charities
• Why residue and remainder clauses matter and what should be in them
• Lessons from the courts.

Session 3: Playing Fair: Effective Equalisation Provisions

The intention to ensure beneficiaries share equally in the estate is very common, but this needs to be supported by clear and precise drafting. This session will take a deep-dive into drafting equalisation clauses and other mechanisms to achieve the desired result of fairness in outcome, including:

• What does equalisation in the estate really mean?
• Strategies for achieving equalisation through structuring and drafting of testamentary documents
• Forethought and forecasting in the drafting process
• Factoring in tax, duty and other impacts
• Managing risks from asset value changes and other developments between original drafting and death
• Relevant cases and examples