Is it Legal to Maintain a Copy of Your Will?

A copy of your will is legal sometimes, yet if offers court proceedings for creating it to be the true replica of the original and under situations where the original might be lost. If an original exists, the copy has no bearing at all apart from to advise the interested parties of the existence of the will and its entry into the probate. In the complete absence of an original will, most of the state courts have different guidelines for admitting a copy into probate.

Statement of Cancellation

Many of the state laws assume that if there is no original statement of a will, the person or a testator who prepared it, destroyed it. This is the legal method of revoking a will in many states. Possibly, someone witnessed the testator at the time of doing it actually. If nobody saw it occur and an original will might not be produced for the probate after the death of testator, the law in many situations considers it as rebuttable supposition that the will was revoked; even in the case there is a copy. A rebuttable presumption is considered as the fact till someone can prove to the court then. A hearing is normally essential.

Mitigating Circumstances

The statement of revocation is generally rejected in case the testator doesn’t keep the original will in his possession in any case. Most of the people leave out their original wills with a Will Attorney. If the attorney lost the will, their testament to this consequence would also meet your requirements to prove that the testator didn’t deliberately destroy it and copy must be accepted.

Procedure of Proof

Satisfactory proof that the original will was not revoked varies from state to state. The court will possibly expect from you to prove that the signature on the will is of the deceased’s person. You may have to contact the witnesses to the will to affirm that they were present at the signing and that they never approached again to sign a new will and other valid witnesses to validate that the deceased never showed to them that he was revoking the original will. At last, it will come down to the conclusion or jury regardless of whether the copy is accepted and entered into a probate.

If Legitimacy Doesn’t Get Proved

The worst-case situation is that you have just a copy of the will and there is no other manner of proving to the court that the testator didn’t destroy the original one. For this situation, most of the states treat the process of procedure just as the deceased die without making a will, also known as intestate and the state’s intestacy laws take over it. This is a legal list of sequence by relatives of deceased estate that starts with spouses and children and after those proceedings to parents, grandparents and sibling till a living relative is found.

A Will Attorney in Wisconsin can tell you maintaining a copy of will is legal or not. We, at Elder Law Center of Wisconsin, have experienced attorneys with vast years of experience aiding families in complex legal and financial matters. Contact us today for more insights!