Published on: 25th January 2021

Estate Administration during Covid-19

The Covid-19 pandemic has had enormous implications on how businesses work and we are no different at Casey & Associates – we have had to adapt what we do to service our Clients and, importantly maintain the mental and physical health of our staff. In this article we will give more detail on how Casey & Associates have adapted to the changes caused by Covid-19.

Zoom and telephone

Without the option of face to face meetings when the first lockdown began in March last year, we had to move quickly to taking instructions via Zoom and the telephone. We quickly adapted and made sure the framework of our process was still of the same standard.

We take great care to make sure that Clients are who they said they are and that there are no concerns regarding their mental capacity.

Delay in Estate Administration

We have had to adapt to the Estate Administration process being far more drawn out when our Estate Administration services were needed. Although we remained fully operational, there were significant delays because many third parties did not. This included:

• Royal Mail with post sometimes taking 3 weeks to reach us.
• Banks not being set-up to work efficiently from home, which meant corresponding with them about date of death values (usually relatively straightforward tasks) took much longer than normal.
• HMRC and HM Land Registry were both struggling to set up working from home which resulted severe backlogs.

Each of these delays had an exponential knock-on effect on the Estate Administration process but we kept our Clients informed throughout and offered the best level of service we could in the circumstances.

Office safety

When the first lockdown began we kept our office open due to being classed as ‘exempt’ orders. We did, however, have some members of our team working remotely. We put a number of measures in place to maintain a safe working environment whilst maintaining efficient operations as a team. These included:

• Setting an office rota which meant we could keep control over how many team members are in the office at any one time.
• Having a can of Aerosol disinfectant to disinfect envelopes when they come in.
• Changing the layout of the office to make it ‘Covid Secure’.
• Having a daily morning cleaning routine with, for example, bannisters, door handles, mice, keyboards and light switches cleaned at the start of each day.

These processes have allowed us to keep our office open whilst keeping our team members and their families safe.

Our systems and processes

We have always been looking at ways to help our business run as efficiently as possible, whilst still maintaining our high levels of Client service, and were in the process before the first lockdown of switching to a bespoke, secure, cloud based system that allows data to be accessed much more easily remotely. As part of this, we were subsequently going to have new phone systems installed. The lockdown accelerated all these plans and we now have our new cloud based solution, with phone systems being implemented much sooner than originally planned. This allowed our team to seamlessly work from home and has enabled us to remain fully operational.

More email than post!

With post taking longer than normal to reach its destination and there being concerns about the transmission of Covid-19 through the post, we switched to much more email communication as opposed to post. Not only has this allowed us to communicate more quickly and efficiently with our Clients but our move to more email has helped the environment too!

More team engagement

One of the biggest challenges during the Covid-19 pandemic has been keeping our team members engaged and their spirits high. We have done this by having regular team lunches when we can and more regular team meetings, both in person and by Zoom. This has helped maintain cohesion within the team and ensured anyone who is feeling isolated still feels very much part of the team.

We are proud of how we have kept our business operational throughout the pandemic – it has not been easy but we have managed to stay fully operational throughout - continuing to service our Clients while keeping our team safe.

======================================

Our Covid-19 policy is now that if you wish to give instructions or require general information about our Wills, Lasting Powers of Attorney or Trusts then we will carry out a telephone or Zoom appointment. However, if you wish to give instructions to one of our Consultants and you feel that you can only do this at a Face to Face meeting we are offering, at our Consultant’s discretion, a limited number of Face to Face appointments in most of the areas we normally cover (subject to Government advice). To see the areas we normally cover please click here. To arrange an appointment please telephone 01732 868190 or click here.

======================================

Back to all news