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When making your will, you may, for one reason or another, choose to distribute your estate unevenly between your loved ones. However, as a High Court ruling showed, you are under an overriding duty to make reasonable provision for members of your family and anyone else who depends upon you financially. By his will, a man bequeathed £10,000 to each of his three adult children. He left the remainder of his estate, which was worth about £475,000 in total, to his daughter. His two sons subsequently launched proceedings under the...

Those who seek the protection of the law with metaphorical dirty hands are likely to receive short shrift. An Employment Tribunal (ET) powerfully made that point in the case of a religious leader who had engaged in tax evasion. The man launched proceedings after his engagement as a temple's head priest was terminated. Following a hearing, the ET found that he was an employee and that his dismissal was unfair. His complaints that he had not received the National Minimum Wage or holiday pay to which he was entitled were...

Pre-nuptial agreements (PNAs) which are not entered into freely or which have unfair results will generally not be worth the paper they are written on. However, as a High Court case showed, judges are far more likely to treat them as valid if they are signed after taking independent legal advice. The case concerned a PNA executed by a couple about three months before they married. The husband, an extremely successful financier, had a net worth of about £32.5 million at the time and had continued to prosper mightily since....

Many neighbours' disputes may, at least to an outsider, appear trifling. However, as a High Court ruling showed, they matter very much to those involved and, in the absence of amicable negotiation, they can very easily become ruinously expensive. A landowner asserted that his neighbours' right of way over a track that crossed his land was limited to a width of 2.15 metres. The neighbours, however, asserted that the correct figure was 2.5 metres. The dispute blew up into full-scale litigation after the landowner erected steel bollards at each end...