Harrison Marsh LLP

The Problem#

• Every case transfer between solicitors — internally or externally — requires the receiving team to re-key the entire estate into their own case management system
• A single complex estate with 40 assets, 12 beneficiaries, and 3 properties takes a paralegal two full days to re-enter
• Re-keying errors cause IHT miscalculations, missed assets, and delayed Probate Registry applications
• The firm processes approximately 5,000 probate cases per year across five offices
• An estimated 3% of cases trigger HMRC enquiries due to manual data entry errors

How They’d Use INHERIT#

• Export each estate as an INHERIT document using estate.json as the root record, with estate.status mapping directly to their internal lifecycle stages (planning, confirmed, pre_probate, in_administration, distributed, closed)
• Represent beneficiaries and family members as person.json entities, with relationships in kinship.json (blood relations) and relationship.json (non-familial connections)
• Model assets using asset.json with appropriate category values — financial, property_contents, vehicle — and real property in property.json
• Apply the uk-england-wales extension for IHT calculations using nilRateBand, residenceNilRateBand, and inheritanceTaxRate as temporal rules applied at date of death
• Use the scotland extension with confirmation and legalRights for Scottish estates, the ireland extension with spouseLegalRightShare for Irish cases, singapore-malaysia for the Singapore office, and australia-nz with SuperannuationNomination for Australian cases
• Express all monetary values via common/money.json in minor currency units, eliminating rounding errors during transfer

The Integration#

• Bidirectional: the case management system exports INHERIT documents when transferring cases and imports them when receiving cases from other firms
• Incoming documents are validated against the INHERIT JSON Schema before import, with invalid submissions automatically rejected
• The firm publishes a conformance-declaration.json at Level 2, declaring which entities their system supports

The Business Case#

• Case transfer time drops from 5 working days to 2 — a 60% reduction
• Eliminating re-keying across 5,000 cases saves approximately 2,500 paralegal days per year — roughly 10 FTEs, worth £350,000 annually at blended paralegal cost
• Automated IHT calculations using the uk-england-wales temporal rules eliminate the manual errors that currently trigger HMRC enquiries on 3% of cases

Before / After#

Without INHERIT:

1. Solicitor A completes estate work and exports a summary as a PDF or spreadsheet
2. File is emailed to Solicitor B’s office
3. Paralegal at Solicitor B’s office opens the file and begins re-keying — deceased details, beneficiaries, 40+ assets, property descriptions, IHT figures
4. Re-keying takes two full days; paralegal cross-references the original PDF line by line
5. Senior solicitor reviews the re-keyed data and spots three discrepancies — a missing bank account, a wrong property value, and an incorrect beneficiary relationship
6. Corrections take another half-day; the Probate Registry application is delayed by a week

With INHERIT:

1. Solicitor A’s case management system exports the estate as a validated INHERIT document
2. Solicitor B’s system imports the document, automatically mapping entities to internal fields
3. Schema validation confirms all required data is present and correctly structured
4. Senior solicitor reviews the imported data — everything matches, no re-keying needed
5. Probate Registry application proceeds the same day