Heirtrace provides unique trace and asset reunification solutions to the financial service sector, lawyers and pension professionals. We specialise in locating heirs and beneficiaries of deceased customers to facilitate the reunification of unclaimed assets. This can involve resolving intestacy cases and identifying missing beneficiaries.

In our work with the financial service sector, lawyers and pension funds, we always work to pre agreed fixed fees, which are reflective of the time and skill required to resolve an individual case, these fees are normally only chargeable upon success. When we work with the legal sector our fee is always paid from the estate as a whole, so is shared evenly between all of the beneficiaries.

Our clients are fully aware of the size of the asset to be reunified with the heirs and beneficiaries and are therefore able to make a conscious decision, in advance, on whether our fees are fair and reasonable relative to the asset, so we do not discourage our clients from passing on our tracing fee to the beneficiaries.

However most of our large financial service industry clients choose to pay for the cost of tracing the heirs and beneficiaries out of their business expenditure as a gesture of goodwill to their customers. This means that the beneficiaries receive the entire asset they are entitled too, without any tracing cost deductions.

We support the view of Title Research that Probate Genealogists fees should be fair and proportionate to the work involved and not the value of the asset to be distributed, and we demonstrate this by not insisting on knowing the value of the asset to be distributed before we begin work on tracing the heirs and beneficiaries.

Danielle Higgins
Managing Director