Jersey is one of the few jurisdictions that still reserves part of an estate for close family by law. That protection is called la légitime, and it is the reason a Jersey will cannot always do what it says on its face.
Under Jersey succession law, a person is not entirely free to leave their movable estate — cash, investments, shares and personal property — wherever they please. A fixed share is reserved for their children, and, where there is one, for a surviving spouse or civil partner. The precise share depends on who survives; for children it is commonly up to a third of the movable estate, and it cannot simply be written out by the will.
Immovable property in Jersey — land and buildings — follows its own separate rules, and in practice the two are usually dealt with together.
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When an Heir Has Been Cut Out
We are usually instructed by the person on the wrong side of a will: the child who has been left out, the sibling who watched an estate move sideways, the heir whose share disappeared into a structure set up in the last years of a parent’s life.
Philip Sinel has spent more than thirty years on exactly this work — Jersey estate and trust litigation aimed at recovering what family members are entitled to, and what has been put beyond their reach.
The claims we see most often are these:
- Dispossessed heirs and wronged siblings — a légitime share defeated by lifetime gifts, by a will made late, or by assets moved into a trust or a company.
- Capacity — a will or a transfer made when its maker no longer had the mental capacity to make it.
- Duress and undue influence — a vulnerable person pressured into signing, changing or giving away what was not theirs alone to give.
How These Cases Are Won
Forced-heirship disputes are won on evidence, not on indignation. Where capacity, a disputed signature or undue influence is in issue, we build the record that a court can act on — consultant psychiatric assessment of capacity, handwriting and document examination — and we trace assets through the structures used to move them out of reach.
That last part is specialist work. It is the same trust and asset-recovery litigation the firm has done for thirty years, applied to a family estate rather than a commercial creditor.
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