If you wish to contest a family will, it will help enormously if you can claim to be a “Lame Duck”. The legal profession is very sympathetic to such types even where the Lame Duck status has been self inflicted by a lifetime of idleness, overeating, drug abuse and smoking heavily.
It is well nigh impossible for other beneficiaries to contest your claim for extra funds under the will because the Lame Duck status will give you a certain immunity. Unless they are prepared to spend the bulk of the estate by going to trial, most will end up coughing up the extra hundreds of thousands of dollars you are asking for. Think of it as “go-away” money. The lawyers and barristers all get richer, as does the Lame Duck, but the rest of you go away shaking your heads and trying to recall what it was Shakespeare said about the law all those centuries ago. Nothing has really changed.
So, has does one go about achieving this Lame Duck status?
1. RUIN ONE’S HEALTH
This is achieved by a lifetime of being bone idle, overeating (easily achieved if one has a Maccas or Kentucky Fried Chicken nearby), drug abuse and smoking.
By the time one’s “rich” elderly parent reaches croaking age, you should, at the very least, be obese, diabetic and able to lay claim to a long string of illnesses. I should add that it helps to have a friendly doctor on side, preferably an old school friend.
In my own experience, these family doctors will even suggest that obesity does not affect one’s life expectancy. This must be good news to any overweight readers out there.
2. DEVELOP A STRING OF PSYCHIATRIC ILLNESSES
This, too, is easy. A simple Google search today will reveal all you need to know to fool any sympathetic psychiatrist. One look at you, the Lame Duck, one of life’s losers hobbling in, bringing your old lap dog along for mental support, in need of a hip or knee replacement, will get their sympathy immediately. You don’t have to be truthful in any of this. In fact, it will help if you leave out any successes you have had in life and concentrate instead on lying about your family for the sad picture you now present. PTSD and ADHD seem to be special favourites at the moment and many weekly women’s magazines and the Internet can provide you with all the necessary symptoms.
Even if the said family can prove your life story and family beatings is a web of lies, it is never going to be tested unless your rellos are prepared to risk all with a trial. Most aren’t. Thus, you are safe from any hard evidence they can dig up such as independent medical evidence to the contrary, diaries, letters, newspaper articles and so-on.
Don’t worry, you will have the legal system working for you at every step encouraging pre-trial Settlement and Mediation to ensure that by the time they go through these two MANDATORY steps they and you will have spent so much on legal fees that your outrageous claim will never be challenged in a court – unless there is a Gina Rheinhart sized estate involved, of course.
3. TO BE CONTINUED
Filling in the gaps 