If you run a will writing practice, there's a question worth sitting with for a moment. Of all the enquiries that came in last month, through your website, by phone, from referral partners, how many actually turned into consultations?
Not a rough guess. The actual number.
Most will writers can't answer that question. And that's the problem.
The will writing market is growing. Your share of it might not be.
The UK wills, probate and trusts market was valued at £2.8 billion in 2024, growing at roughly 7% per year, with projections putting it at £3.6 billion by 2028. Will ownership among UK adults has crossed 40% for the first time, reaching approximately 22 million people. And with 34% of adults saying they plan to write a will in the next twelve months, the pipeline of potential clients is substantial.
But the supply side is crowded. There are over 6,000 law firms offering will writing services, more than 1,700 members of the Society of Will Writers, and at least 40 to 50 pure-play online will writing services competing for attention. No single brand commands more than 10% of the market. It's fragmented, price-sensitive, and increasingly driven by whoever responds first.
That last point is the one that matters most.
The speed penalty is real, and it's expensive
A mystery shopping exercise reported by Legal Futures found that as many as one in five enquiries submitted to UK wills and probate firms went completely unanswered. Not answered slowly. Not answered badly. Just ignored entirely.
A separate UK law firm call-handling audit recorded 90 incoming calls over a 10-day period. 37% of them went unanswered. The auditors estimated each missed call represented at least £750 in potential revenue. Converting even 30% of those missed calls could have been worth £270,000 per year to the practice.
These aren't hypothetical numbers. They're from real UK firms losing real money through basic operational gaps.
The broader research on response speed is equally stark. An analysis published in Harvard Business Review, covering 2,241 companies, found that 23% of businesses never responded to a web-generated enquiry at all. Among those that did respond, the average response time was 42 hours. Research from MIT found that the odds of successfully contacting a lead drop by a factor of 10 if you wait longer than 5 minutes. After 30 minutes, calling back is 21 times less effective than calling within that first 5-minute window.
For will writing specifically, the commercial impact is amplified by the nature of the service. A prospective client looking for a will writer is usually ready to act. They've decided they need a will, they've searched online, and they're contacting providers. If you don't respond quickly, they won't wait. They'll move to the next result on Google. Research indicates that 78% of customers go with the first business that responds, regardless of minor price differences.
In a market where the median will instruction is around £130 and the median fee for a professionally drafted will is £400 to £720, losing three or four enquiries a month to slow follow-up adds up quickly.
Why it happens (and why it's not your fault, but it is your problem)
The typical will writing practice runs enquiries through a combination of email inboxes, phone calls, website contact forms, and sometimes WhatsApp messages. There's no single place where all of this lands. Enquiries arrive while you're in consultations, on the phone with another client, or out of the office entirely.
The SRA's research into small legal practices found that 55% had introduced new technology in the last five years, but 25% were still "considering it" and 16% had no plans at all. The main motivations for adopting technology were increasing efficiency (61%) and improving client services (59%), both of which directly relate to how enquiries are handled. But the barriers are real too: switching systems and migrating data is time-consuming, tools often don't talk to each other, and team members resist changing how they work.
The result is that many practices are running their new business pipeline through the same processes they used a decade ago. And while that might have been fine when most will writing work came through referrals and walk-ins, the market has changed. Consumers are now finding will writers through search engines and review sites (both channels grew from 7% to 12% in recent surveys), and these are high-intent prospects who contact multiple providers quickly.
If your process for handling those enquiries involves checking your email when you get a chance, the maths works against you.
What the firms getting it right actually do
The practices that convert more of their enquiries into paying clients aren't necessarily better at drafting wills. They're better at responding quickly and following up consistently.
Here's what that looks like in practice:
Every enquiry goes to one place. Whether it comes in by phone, email, website form, or WhatsApp, it lands in a single system where someone can see it and act on it. No more checking three different inboxes and hoping nothing was missed.
Automated acknowledgement within seconds. When someone fills in a contact form on your website at 9pm on a Tuesday, they get an immediate, professional response confirming you've received their enquiry and telling them what happens next. This isn't a cold, robotic auto-reply. It's a well-written message that reassures them their enquiry is being handled, ideally with a link to book a consultation directly.
Structured follow-up sequences. If someone enquires but doesn't book immediately, they get a series of helpful follow-ups over the following days and weeks. Not pushy sales messages, but useful information: what to expect from the process, what documents to have ready, answers to common questions. This keeps you front of mind while they're making their decision.
Missed call text-back. If you can't answer the phone because you're in a consultation, the caller gets an automatic text within seconds: "Sorry I couldn't pick up. I'm with a client right now but I'll call you back within the hour. In the meantime, you can book a consultation here." That one feature alone can recover enquiries that would otherwise call the next will writer on the list.
A UK professional services firm (FidLaw) reported that after adopting a unified system for managing client communications, their revenue increased by 50% and they were able to collect payment 50% faster. They moved from Saturday morning spreadsheet sessions to an automated workflow. That's not a technology story. It's a time story.
What to do this week
You don't need to overhaul your entire practice to start capturing more of the enquiries you're already generating. Here are three things you can do in the next seven days:
1. Count your enquiries. Go through your email, website form submissions, and call log for the last 30 days. How many enquiries came in? How many turned into booked consultations? If you don't know, that's the first problem to solve.
2. Check your response time. Pick five recent website enquiries and look at how long it took to respond. If the answer is "hours" or "next day," you're losing a significant percentage of those leads before you even speak to them.
3. Set up an automatic acknowledgement. Even if you do nothing else, configure your website contact form to send an immediate reply that includes your phone number, a booking link if you have one, and a line that says "I'll be in touch within [timeframe]." It takes 15 minutes to set up and it changes the first impression for every enquiry.
If you want to understand where your practice sits compared to the benchmarks in this article, we've built a free 2-minute assessment. Answer 10 questions about how you currently handle enquiries, follow-up, reviews, and client communication, and you'll get an instant report showing where the gaps are and what to focus on first.