An accounting client had built a successful business from a standing start, with exactly the advisers you’d expect a growing company to have: a company solicitor for their premises and a different solicitor who managed a funding round, bringing in a small number of external shareholders. One of this client’s adult children was already working in his business, and he had begun to talk about bringing another child in.
His will, though, was the one he and his wife had written years earlier, when the children were still at school: everything to her, in full.
Nobody involved had done anything wrong. Neither solicitor had reason to check the other’s work, or to weigh it against an old will neither had seen.
If this will had been called on as written, however, his wife would have inherited a shareholding alongside people she’d never met, in a company she’d had no part in building – just as their own child was stepping into a bigger role in the business.
The only person in the room who could see all of it – the will, the shareholding, the succession plan taking shape informally in conversation – was his accountant.
Not because anyone had asked her to look at an estate plan, but because she was the one adviser whose job had always required an understanding of the “big picture”, not just her own corner of it.
The client decides, the documents implement
Chartered Accountants Ireland’s position paper on artificial intelligence, An Empowered Profession – AI and the Future of Accountancy, highlights that, as AI takes on more routine, rules-based work, the accountant’s value increasingly sits in judgement, relationship and trust.
Estate planning is close to a textbook case for this: it can’t be automated because what a client actually wants to happen – and why – has to come from the client, and usually surfaces first through the adviser who already knows them best.
The conventional route into estate planning runs roughly like this: a client decides they need a will, a solicitor is instructed and tax issues are identified and dealt with along the way.
This is a reasonable sequence for getting documents drafted, but a poor process for working out what the documents should say.
A will, a trust, a pension nomination or a shareholders’ agreement can implement a decision, but none of them can make the decision for the client. By the time a solicitor is taking instructions, the client is often being asked to confirm who benefits, in what proportions and why – questions they’ve rarely worked through properly.
They are often unaware, too, that existing arrangements already answer some of these questions. While the paperwork moves fast, the thinking underneath is often slow and incomplete.
Why accountants see it first
For a long-standing client, the accountant is often the only adviser who holds the key to the “big picture”: what the client owns, which children are financially independent and whether the future of the business comes down to one person’s decision or several.
A solicitor drafting a will based on client instructions won’t have this context unless the client thinks to volunteer it, and clients rarely know which details matter.
This is not a case for accountants drafting wills or offering advice they are not positioned to give. It is a case for recognising when what the accountant already knows is quietly raising questions the client hasn’t yet thought to ask.
The gap in the scenario above wasn’t a lack of expertise anywhere in the room: two capable solicitors and an accountant were involved. It was that nobody had connected what each legal adviser knew to a decision the client had already made informally but never documented.
Estate planning: a connected system
If you treat estate planning as “who gets what when I die”, then you miss most of what needs deciding. A sample of what sits beneath it:
Continuity: If one spouse dies suddenly, does the survivor have enough income to maintain their standard of living – not on paper, but in practice?
Family: Are the children in genuinely comparable circumstances? Has one already received significant support the others haven’t? What does equality actually mean in this family?
Business: If one child works in the company or on the farm and others don’t, has anyone decided what should happen to it – or has everyone simply assumed the answer is obvious?
The family home: Is it “obvious” who inherits the home? Would the whole family answer this question the same way?
Existing arrangements: What already passes outside the will – through joint ownership, pension nominations, company agreements or insurance – regardless of what the will says?
Each of these issues can quietly override a client’s intentions, documented or not, if nobody checks assumptions against reality.
Decisions before solutions
In estate planning, the most useful thing a client can arrive at is a clear statement of intent: “My priority is that my spouse can maintain her standard of living”, for example, or, “I want my daughter to continue the business, but I don’t want that to leave her siblings worse off”.
Statements like this give every professional adviser something to work with.
The underlying philosophy here is straightforward: to help people make the decisions only they can make, before asking professionals to implement them.
The accountant, often more than any other adviser, knows the client well enough to see that a decision is needed in the first place. They can weigh the tax reliefs and implications of this decision.
The financial adviser structures income and investments around the decision and the solicitor turns it into binding legal paperwork.
A practical opening, not a pitch
None of this requires an accountant to announce, unprompted, “we need to do your estate planning”.
It’s usually enough to ask, “Does the current will still reflect the family as it stands today?”, “Has anyone checked what the shareholders’ or partnership agreement actually says should happen to the business?”
This work is not dependent on the client’s age or the size of the balance sheet.
A farmer in his seventies, a post-exit tech entrepreneur in her forties or a family managing wealth built across two generations may all be working from the same gap – assets and structures that have grown more complicated than the decisions made about them.
Often, the accountant’s real value doesn’t lie in having every answer; it lies in noticing the questions the client hasn’t yet realised they need to answer.
By mapping the terrain and clarifying intentions at an early stage, the accountant can play an invaluable role in guiding preparations for an effective estate planning process.
Kerri O’Connell FCA, CTA, TEP, is a private client tax adviser and founder of Tax for Humans which offers Your Last & Greatest Gift, a dedicated estate planning service for clients