Executorship – when the Probate Court is to appoint your executor
Your will is settled, good for you. What matters now is the right hand to carry it out. You have made your will and directed executorship within it – a wise decision.
In doing so, you ensure that your last wishes are not left to chance, to disputes among heirs, or to the overburdening of any one individual, but are carried out by a person bound solely to your will.
Perhaps you have at the same time deliberately chosen not to name a particular person. There are good reasons for this: A named confidant may predecease you, fall ill, or decline the office. Family members, as executors, easily find themselves in conflicts of interest. And who can say today who will be the right choice in ten or twenty years’ time?
The law offers you a well-established path here: under section 2200 of the German Civil Code (BGB), you may in your will request the probate court (Nachlassgericht) to appoint the executor. Should the need arise, the court then selects a suitable, independent person – frequently a lawyer experienced in succession law.
What this means for you
Appointment by the court combines two things that are otherwise difficult to reconcile: certainty and flexibility.
Your direction that there be executorship stands firm – who carries it out is decided only when it matters. The probate court examines suitability, ensures neutrality, and appoints a person who stands no closer to one party of heirs than to another.
You may point the court in the right direction: your will can set out criteria – for instance qualification as a lawyer, experience in estate administration, or particular expertise where your assets include company shareholdings, real property or a foreign dimension. You may also propose a specific person or firm, and in practice the court regularly follows such a proposal.
What an executor does for your heirs
The executor takes possession of the estate, draws up the estate inventory, discharges liabilities, fulfils legacies and testamentary conditions, and brings about the partition of the estate among the heirs – according to your directions, not according to the loudest wish at the table. He deals with banks, public authorities, the tax office and the land registry, attends to the inheritance tax return, and renders account to the heirs.
For your heirs this means: relief in what is already a difficult time, a neutral point of contact in place of family friction, and the assurance that everything proceeds properly and transparently.
Why a lawyer as executor
The administration of an estate is the application of law in earnest: compulsory portion claims, the enforcability of legacies, tax obligations and, where relevant, the continuation or orderly transfer of a business. As a lawyer with a long-standing focus on succession law and executorship, We are regularly appointed to the office, when a testator left the name opne to be appointed after the death. Onethereby obtains an administration of the office that is subject to professional supervision, secured by professional indemnity insurance, and held to the standard of a lawyer’s duty of care.
The executor’s remuneration in Germany is prescribed in the Civil Code according to section 2221 BGB. Reasonable remuneration can also be regulated transparently in your will – We will be able to explain the customary yardsticks and details according to the present regulations.
Particular expertise: Crypto-Assets, FinTech and Assets held abroad
Estates look different today from twenty years ago.
Increasingly, they include crypto-assets, wallets, tokens and shareholdings in FinTech companies – positions whose safeguarding and realisation demand particular technical and legal knowledge, hitherto rarely encountered in traditional executorship. Specialised in international commercial law, we are familiar with these questions from ongoing practice – from securing access to digital assets, through their valuation, to their orderly realisation or transfer to the heirs.
Moreover, many testators leave real property abroad – within the EU as well as in Switzerland or the USA. Its administration calls for experience with cross-border legal questions (such as the EU Succession Regulation), the ability to negotiate confidently in several languages, and a practised hand in dealing with foreign authorities and courts – for example, the French judiciary.
This experience helps to ensure that the part of your estate lying beyond the border passes exactly as you have directed.
Your will sets the course. Whoever executes it sees it through. How to proceed now
If your will has already been made, we shall examine together whether the direction of executorship and the request to the probate court are worded so that they take effect smoothly when the time comes – and whether additions would be sensible, such as suitability criteria, the proposal of a particular person, or a remuneration clause.
Often a brief handwritten codicil or a notarial supplement suffices. Arrange an initial consultation.
You will receive a clear assessment of whether your existing arrangements hold good – and of what, if anything, is still wanting, so that your will is one day carried out exactly as you set it down.
