Liam O'Neill is a partner in our personal law team based in Ilkley.
He covers a wide range of services for clients including those relating to wills, powers of attorney, capital tax planning, the administration of estates of deceased individuals and the creation and administration of trusts.
Liam has significant experience of dealing with disputes relating to the validity and/or construction of wills, the administration of estates and trusts, and claims brought against the estates of deceased persons by dependants under the Inheritance (Provision for Family & Dependants) Act 1975.
Matters Liam has recently worked on:
- Restructuring a number of family trusts which each held shares in a valuable family company. This allowed different branches of the same family to control their own portion of the underlying shareholdings and to hold those shareholdings for future generations of their respective branches of the family in a tax-efficient manner.
- Acting for a client in relation to the removal of trustees of a family trust, subsequently pursuing those former trustees for an account of profits received by them in breach of duty and achieving an out of court settlement to compensate his client for their losses.
- Guiding executors through the administration of a deceased person’s estate at a time when there were ongoing disputes between the beneficiaries about the ownership of a family company and a number of industrial units.
- Acting for a professional firm in an application to court to rectify a will that they had prepared for a client, which had been signed by their deceased client with key clauses missing from the will.
- Acting for a client bringing a claim against the validity of a will made as a result of fraudulent calumny, in this case a deliberate misrepresentation having been made to the deceased about his client and which led to the deceased changing their will to remove his client as a beneficiary.
Liam is a full member of both the Society of Trust & Estates Practitioners (STEP) and the Association of Contentious Trust and Probate Specialists (ACTAPS).
He is married with two children so time is limited, but when possible he loves spending time on the trails, either mountain biking, trail running or walking; following F1 and both codes of rugby; reading; and attempting to play the guitar.