For solicitors, accountants, IFAs and notaries

In Portugal, Spain, Italy and France, much of what passes for “succession help” can be done by anyone — agents, intermediaries, unregulated advisers. We are the regulated, insured lawyer in all four countries. Your client’s work is signed personally by Colin Carroll — a dual-qualified solicitor, admitted in both England and Ireland, who knows the English and Irish probate process from the inside, and is today the registered, insured European lawyer under EU Directive 98/5/EC in Portugal, Spain, Italy and France — the Ordem dos Advogados, the Ilustre Colegio de Abogados, the Ordine degli Avvocati and the Ordre des avocats — with professional-indemnity insurance in each.

We publish fixed prices for it. And we pay no referral fees and charge none — your client is told exactly what we cost, and the relationship stays yours.

Three assurances worth stating plainly. First, succession is all we do — we are a specialist firm in the narrowest sense: cross-border estates, and the tasks that hang off them (the succession-tax filings, the property transfer or sale at the end). No general practice, no conveyancing for the living, no sidelines. Second, we do no domestic work in your country at all — our practice is the continental leg and nothing else, so there is nothing on your side of the border for us to compete for; the client comes back to you, every time. Third, the quiet professional point: foreign law handled in-house sits on your indemnity record. Referred to us, it is insured specialist work on ours — professional-indemnity cover in each of the four countries, under each country’s own bar. Helping you help your client is not a slogan here; it is the business model.

Two ways to work with us:

1. Refer the whole local matter. You stay lead on the home estate; we handle the local leg and keep you updated — fees separate and shown to the client up front.
2. Instruct us for one slice — a certificate of foreign law, an opinion on who inherits, a bank release. Every service is individually priced and instructable.

What this looks like in practice: recent examples of the work — including matters where the referring firm kept its client and the family never travelled.

Because Colin Carroll is both the regulated local lawyer in all four countries and an English-qualified solicitor, we produce the cross-border certificates these matters need in-house, in the right language, ready to file — without the outsourcing and sworn translation a referral chain adds.

Full detail — forums, languages and the complex-case fee: Certificates of foreign law. Free where we handle the estate.