About Velati
We started Velati because the people we love most kept being the ones the template overlooked.
Velati is a will service for England & Wales, built specifically for modern households — cohabiting partners, blended families, single parents, the friend you'd actually want to raise your children. It is also, quietly, an attempt to make the experience of writing a will feel like a small act of care rather than a small act of paperwork.
Our story
Two failed wills and a slow afternoon at a kitchen table.
Velati started with a friend's mother dying without a will. The family had assumed she had one — she'd been a careful person, and had told her partner, more than once, that she'd "sorted it". She had not. She and her partner had lived together for nineteen years; under the intestacy rules, he inherited nothing. It took a year, two solicitors and a court application under the 1975 Act to resolve it, in the worst part of grieving someone.
The second case was an old will. A man in his late seventies, two children from a first marriage, a long second marriage and a stepson he'd raised since he was four. The will, written in 1986, left everything to his second wife outright. When she remarried a year after his death, his children — and the stepson he'd treated as his own — received nothing. It was lawful. It was the opposite of what he had wanted.
We started Velati to make those two cases harder to land in. The first by making it genuinely easy to make a valid will in an evening. The second by asking different questions — the ones a modern UK family actually faces, not the ones a 1925 statute imagined.
What we believe
Four principles, and a thing we won't do.
01
Translate, never intimidate.
Wills are written in a register most people never use. We translate every clause into modern UK English, and only fall back on the legal register when it's the canonical term. The plain-English review is the thing you read; the will is the thing you sign.
02
Honest, never alarming.
We tell you the truth — that, without a will, the law treats your unmarried partner as a stranger; that an old will can be worse than no will. We never use fear to push you towards a sale.
03
Built for the family you actually have.
We don't assume marriage. We don't assume biological children. We don't assume one tidy line of inheritance. The questionnaire branches around the family you describe, not the one a template assumes.
04
A small, finished thing.
No subscription. No upsell. No emails three months later asking if you'd like to upgrade. You pay once, the document is yours, and we leave you alone unless the law changes in a way that matters.
The thing we won't do
We won't produce a will for a case we don't think we should.
Some situations belong with a regulated solicitor — significant offshore assets, business succession, foreign domicile, capacity questions, suspected coercion, contested estates. When we screen for one of these, we say so before you pay, and we route you to a partner firm. We'd rather lose the sale than produce a template that might fail when it matters.
A note on regulation
We're not a law firm. Our templates are written by people who are.
Will-writing in England & Wales is not a reserved legal activity. That means anyone can sell wills — and the consumer-protection picture is uneven. We've taken the strictest stance we can: every Velati template is written and reviewed by a regulated solicitor (SRA-authorised) before it goes live, and is reviewed again whenever the law changes.
Velati Ltd is a UK company registered in England & Wales. We hold professional indemnity insurance. Our terms of business set out exactly what we do and don't take responsibility for. Our complaints process and the route to the Legal Ombudsman are linked from every page footer.