Your firm drafted the will. It sits in your safe custody, where it has been for eleven years. The client trusted you with the most personal legal document they will ever sign.
Last month that client died. Their executor lives in Brisbane, has never heard your firm’s name, and typed “probate lawyer near me” into their phone the day after the funeral. The firm at the top of that search now holds the file.
This happens quietly, which is why so few principals see it as a pattern. The will comes out of safe custody. A release is signed. The estate work — the grant application, the administration, the conveyance of the family home — goes to a competitor whose only advantage was being visible at the right moment.
The will bank is not a client bank
Wills and estates practices carry an assumption that safe custody equals future work. The assumption fails at a specific point: the person who instructs on probate was never your client.
The executor chooses the solicitor. In Queensland, that choice is entirely theirs. Even where a will names a particular firm to act in the administration, that direction has no binding force — the executor can instruct anyone.1 Your relationship with the deceased, however long it ran, transfers to nobody.
There is also no register of wills in Australia.2 When someone dies, the executor’s first task is often locating the document. If they know it sits with your firm, you get a phone call and a genuine chance at the file. If they only know a will exists somewhere, they start with a search engine. Either way, the estate work itself is decided by whoever the executor chooses to engage — and executors who feel no existing connection to the drafting firm choose from what they can see.
Every will in your safe custody represents drafting revenue already earned and administration revenue still open to competition. The larger and older your will bank, the more estate files are currently in play.
Why probate searches behave differently
Most legal searches involve deliberation. Someone considering a property purchase or a business restructure reads, compares, and returns days later. Probate searches compress that entire process into hours, for reasons built into the executor’s situation.
The executor is under pressure they didn’t choose. They are grieving, often coordinating family, and holding a legal role they never trained for. Banks freeze accounts. Institutions ask for a grant before releasing anything. The executor wants the burden handed to a professional quickly.
The process itself imposes deadlines. A notice of intended application must run in the Queensland Law Reporter, followed by a 14-day objection period.3 The Public Trustee must be notified seven days before filing.4 The court then takes weeks to process the grant.5 An executor who understands any of this understands that every day before engaging a solicitor extends the whole timeline. The executor’s year — the principle that an estate should be administered within twelve months — adds a horizon they may already have been warned about.6
They have no basis for comparison. A commercial client can judge lawyers against prior experience. Most executors have never engaged a solicitor for anything. Lacking any other signal, proximity and visibility become the decision. The firm that appears first, with an address nearby and reviews that read as credible, gets the call.
“The window between search and instruction is short, and it opens without warning. A firm cannot market its way into that window after it opens.”
The result is a search behaviour closer to emergency plumbing than to considered legal procurement. The window between search and instruction is short, and it opens without warning. A firm cannot market its way into that window after it opens. Visibility has to already be in place.
Where the executor actually looks
Three surfaces decide the outcome of a probate search in South East Queensland, and they reward different work.
The map pack. For “probate lawyer” plus a suburb, Google shows three local firms above everything else. Placement here depends heavily on your Google Business Profile — its category accuracy, its review depth, and the physical proximity of your office to the searcher. Firms with a strong profile in the executor’s suburb routinely outrank firms with better websites two suburbs away.
Organic results. Below the map pack, page structure decides who appears. A firm whose website treats “wills and estates” as one paragraph on a services page gives Google nothing to rank for a probate query. A firm with a dedicated page answering what an executor in Queensland actually needs to know — what a grant is, when one is required, what the court process involves — gives Google a reason to show it.
AI answers. A growing share of executors now ask ChatGPT or Google’s AI results what to do when someone dies. These systems assemble answers from pages that explain the process clearly and cite firms that demonstrate genuine Queensland expertise. Firms invisible to conventional search are invisible here too — the same structured, authoritative content feeds both.
None of this rewards the quality of your estate practice directly. A firm can run the best succession practice on the Sunshine Coast and lose every executor-initiated file to a mediocre competitor with a well-maintained digital presence. The executor cannot see your expertise. They can only see what search shows them.
What a wills and estates firm can do about it
The fix is unglamorous and specific.
Start with your Google Business Profile, because the map pack decides the highest-intent searches. Correct categories, complete service listings, and a steady flow of genuine reviews from estate clients — collected in line with QLS Guidance Statement No. 24 on testimonials7 — move the needle more than most firms expect. That work sits within local SEO for Queensland law firms.
Build a probate page that serves the executor, since the executor is the searcher. Content written for people planning their estates answers a different question at a different moment. The executor searching after a death needs process, timeframes, and reassurance that the firm handles this daily. A page built for that reader ranks for the searches that produce files.
Then protect the will bank itself. A letter to safe custody clients confirming where their will is held, and encouraging them to tell their executor, converts a stored document into a warm referral path. It costs a postage run and recovers files that search visibility alone never will.
The firms losing probate clients to the first result are rarely worse lawyers. They are firms whose visibility never caught up to their practice. That gap is measurable, and it closes with deliberate work.
Felicity Jane Digital works with Queensland wills and estates firms on exactly this problem. Our Legal SEO for wills and estates practices page sets out how we approach it, or request a confidential discussion.
Frequently asked
Does holding a client’s will in safe custody mean the firm will handle the probate?
No. In Queensland the executor chooses the solicitor for the estate administration, and even a clause in the will nominating a particular firm has no binding force. The drafting firm’s advantage is a phone call and a head start — the file itself goes to whoever the executor instructs.
Why do probate enquiries convert so quickly compared with other legal searches?
The executor is under pressure from every direction at once. Banks freeze accounts, institutions ask for a grant before releasing assets, the Queensland Law Reporter notice period and court processing time stretch the timeline, and the executor’s year sets a twelve-month horizon. Most executors have never engaged a solicitor before, so visibility and proximity decide the instruction.
What single change makes the most difference to a wills and estates firm’s probate enquiries?
For most firms, the Google Business Profile. The map pack captures the highest-intent probate searches, and placement there turns on profile completeness, review depth and proximity — signals that operate independently of how well the firm’s website ranks. A dedicated executor-facing probate page is the second priority.
References
1. General law. The position that a testamentary direction nominating a solicitor or firm to act in the administration does not bind the executor is a settled general principle — the executor’s choice of legal representation is their own.
2. Queensland Courts, Searching for wills, probates and administration documents, accessed July 2026. The Supreme Court holds only wills filed as part of a grant application; there is no general register of wills in Australia.
3. Queensland Government, Uniform Civil Procedure Rules 1999 (Qld), rr 597–599, accessed July 2026. Notice of intended application must be published in the Queensland Law Reporter under r 599, with a mandatory 14-day period before filing — confirmed as absolute and non-waivable even in urgent applications.
4. Uniform Civil Procedure Rules 1999 (Qld), rr 598–599. A copy of the notice must also be given to the Public Trustee of Queensland, with a minimum 7-day wait after receipt before filing.
5. Supreme Court of Queensland processing times for grant applications are commonly reported by practitioners at several weeks, varying with registry workload. Stated in copy at that level of generality.
6. Queensland Government, Succession Act 1981 (Qld), accessed July 2026. Together with general law, the source of the “executor’s year” principle that an estate should ordinarily be administered within twelve months of death.
7. Queensland Law Society, Guidance Statement No. 24, accessed July 2026. Obligations applying to the use of client testimonials and reviews by Queensland solicitors.
Jane Cluff