SME profile: Dubai entrepreneurs are making their name in wills

'People save our numbers on their mobile phones with ‘Wills’ as a surname. Deepak Wills, Sumit Wills. That’s how they know us,' says Deepak Gurnani, left, alongside Sumit Ahuja. Antonie Robertson / ThShow more

Two small rooms in a serviced office building in the Al Murooj complex in Dubai house start-up law firm Just Legal, the brainchild of Sumit Ahuja and Deepak Gurnani, two young Indian lawyers hoping to making a living from the UAE’s fledgling probate industry.

“Will writing in Dubai is a volume business and we have seen that volume for the past five or six years,” says Mr Gurnani. “People save our numbers on their mobile phones with ‘Wills’ as a surname. Deepak Wills, Sumit Wills. That’s how they know us.”

With early careers that spanned banking, equities trading, financial recovery and selling mobile phones, the pair met while working at Dubai-based legal firm Just Wills, a part of UK company Just Wills Legal Services based in East Grinstead in Sussex.

After five years they decided to pool their savings and go it alone to set up their own Fujairah free zone-registered firm specialising in will writing and estate planning. It has been up and running for about a year and a half.

“In the legal field there are so many things one can do. We decided to limit our expertise so we can focus on estate planning and be good at it,” says Mr Ahuja. “We were good at our job at the other firm but then we did not have control over the management or process.”

So, for an initial sum of Dh3,000 to Dh4,000 the pair promise a full will-writing service that includes an initial consultation to focus on exactly what the client is hoping to achieve, drafting a will and even accompanying clients to the court to get the will notarised.

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“We do everything,” says Mr Gurnani. “We meet the client, explain the laws and the regulations of the country, how a will can help them, all the things they need to plan, apart from the will. We then draft and translate the will, assist the client in the notary public or UAE courts.”

With clients complaining about the high court fees charged and, with many expats comparing the cost of will writing in the UAE unfavourably with those in their home countries, the pair say that margins are being squeezed further.

“Fees are being pushed down,” Mr Gurnani says. “People coming in from India, the UK, Australia, these markets. The process of drafting and legalising a will is pretty standard and it’s cheap also. In the post office in the UK you can get a draft for £10 or £15. And if you buy it online you can get it for £50 or so. There it is considered not very expensive. But here in the UAE the amount of money they get quoted turns out to be 10 times as much.”

With the DIFC Courts only starting to attest wills from May 2015 and the notary public attesting them for little more than a decade, sceptics may also be a little concerned that there is very little legal precedent for executing any of these expensively attested wills.

Mr Ahuja and Mr Gurnani admit that they have never seen any of the wills they have drafted actually executed.

“For us personally, we have drafted many wills but not everyone comes back to us for executing the will. We may have a very good client but we won’t necessarily know his family. So, God forbid our client dies, we don’t know the chances of whether his family will know us. Sometimes clients purposefully don’t tell the family because of their own preferences,” says Mr Ahuja.

But with Sharia law applied by default to the estates of all people who die intestate in the UAE, lawyers say that it still makes sense for anyone living in the country to make a will if they own property or have children.

Otherwise, under Sharia, assets are divided up into predetermined shares depending upon how many remaining relatives you have. Under the code, sons inherit twice as much as daughters and if a couple has only daughters then much of the estate will pass to the brother of the deceased.

“There is never a right time. If you are decided you should finish the process today,” Mr Gurnani says.

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