Legal Malpractice and the Disappointed Beneficiary under English and German Law

Demuth, Michael

Legal Malpractice and the Disappointed Beneficiary under English and German Law

Master Thesis

2000

Abstract

The matter of this survey is the so-called disappointed-beneficiary cases. In these cases an intended beneficiary of a will suffers a loss, because the will is rendered invalid due to legal malpractice of the will-preparing lawyer. There are several difficult problems contained in these cases. The problems shall be examined by comparing the solutions for these cases under English and under German law. - As will be seen below, policy-considerations form the core of the leading court decisions dealing with that problem in England as well as in Germany because no satisfactory theoretical solution to the problem is been found yet. But in both jurisdictions it seems that the courts and writers concerned with these cases seem to tend to the opinion that the policy reasons are speaking for a solution in which the lawyer is held liable to the disappointed beneficiary. Since the theoretical problems are still not solved, these policy arguments are of crucial importance in the disappointed-beneficiary cases. Next to a survey of the conceptual issues it shall therefore be tried to examine these policy arguments carefully.

Keywords

Private Law

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