This article was written by Nancy Wang Principal Solicitor at W & G Lawyers.
Our earlier piece looked at Hall v Hall [2026] QSC 134, where a handwritten note left by a woman shortly before her death was upheld by the Supreme Court as a valid informal will. A case like that can leave people with a tempting thought: if a scribbled note on the couch can do the job, why bother with a formal will at all?
It’s a fair question — and the honest answer is that reading Hall as a green light to skip the solicitor would be a serious mistake. Here’s why.
Is this kind of case common?
In one sense, yes. Applications to have an informal document recognised as a will under section 18 of the Succession Act 1981 (Qld) are a regular feature of succession litigation in Queensland. Courts here see them often — notes, unsigned drafts, text messages, DIY will kits filled in incorrectly, documents on phones and laptops. The provision exists precisely because life is messy and people frequently record their final wishes in ways that fall short of the strict legal formalities.
So Hall is not an exotic one-off. But being common is not the same as being straightforward.
Was it easy? No.
What the reported summary doesn’t fully convey is just how much work went into that result. This was a contested application. The deceased’s two sons, who received nothing, actively challenged whether their mother had the mental capacity to make a valid will. Because beneficiaries who might naturally have expected to benefit had been excluded, Justice Crow expressly held that the Court had to apply “a significant degree of vigilance” in scrutinising the circumstances.
To get there, the Court had to sift through a great deal of evidence: forensic toxicology, police reports, affidavits from friends and family, and a minute-by-minute analysis of the deceased’s text and Facebook messages across the final days of her life — right down to comparing spelling errors to work out whether she was sober when she wrote the note. That is not a quick or cheap exercise. It is a full-blown court application with lawyers, affidavits, a hearing, and a judgment.
And the estate paid for all of it. The Court ordered that each party’s costs come out of the estate on an indemnity basis. In other words, the very inheritance the deceased wanted her daughter to receive was reduced by the cost of the fight over whether her note counted as a will.
Were the circumstances unique?
Largely, yes — and that’s the point. The will survived because of an unusually strong combination of facts that happened to line up in the applicant’s favour:
- The deceased had told family and friends consistently for over a decade that everything was to go to her daughter.
- She sent a message making clear she had deliberately left her former partner and, by implication, others nothing — showing she had weighed the competing claims.
- She photographed the note on her phone but never sent it, which the Court read as a deliberate act to prove she was sober when she signed it.
- The timing of her messages allowed the Court to infer the note was written before she began drinking heavily.
Take away one or two of those threads, and the outcome could easily have gone the other way. A person relying on an informal document is gambling that, after they’re gone, a court will be able to reconstruct their state of mind from whatever fragments they happened to leave behind. That is a gamble made under the worst possible conditions — with no ability to explain, clarify, or correct anything.
So should you be discouraged from making a proper will?
Emphatically, no — quite the opposite. Hall is not an advertisement for informal wills. It is a cautionary tale about what happens when a formal will isn’t in place. Ms Hall’s daughter ultimately succeeded, but only after litigation, delay, family conflict at an already devastating time, and a bill paid out of the estate.
A properly drafted and witnessed will avoids all of that. It carries a presumption of validity, it is far harder to challenge, and it spares your loved ones the expense and uncertainty of asking a court to guess what you meant. The few hundred dollars and short appointment it takes to do it properly are trivial next to the cost of getting it wrong.
And what if you’re left out — or there’s no will at all?
Here’s where it gets interesting, and where many people are surprised by their rights.
What happens if you open a loved one’s estate and discover you’ve been left nothing — or that there was never a formal will to begin with? Are you simply out of luck? The answer, in Queensland, is often no. The law provides avenues both for eligible people who feel they haven’t been adequately provided for, and for families left to deal with an estate where no valid will exists at all.
Those avenues — family provision claims and the rules of intestacy — are the subject of our next article. We’ll explain who can bring a claim, what the Court looks at, and what actually happens to an estate when there’s no will to follow.
Stay tuned.
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This article is general information only and does not constitute legal advice under Australian law. For advice specific to your situation, please contact W & G Lawyers. For further details, please click here to view our disclaimer.