Editorial policy

Our guides explain wills, estates and probate in plain English for people in Nigeria. This is how we write them, check them and keep them up to date.

How a guide is written

We choose topics from the questions people actually ask: questions to our support team, questions lawyers raise while reviewing wills, and searches on our site that find nothing. Each guide starts with a short, direct answer to one question, then explains it.

Our editorial team writes every guide. Technology, including AI tools, may help prepare a first draft. A person then checks every sentence and rewrites as needed. Nothing is published automatically, and we never present technology-assisted text as written by a lawyer.

Review before publication

• An editor who did not write the guide approves it.
• Guides that explain legal detail are then reviewed and approved by a lawyer or compliance reviewer who did not write them. Until that approval, they are not published.
• Guides on the most sensitive topics (signing and witnessing, electronic signatures, probate, dying without a will, customary and Islamic succession, estate administration, assets abroad and jointly owned property) must also be supported by legal sources a lawyer has checked.
• The approved wording is fixed. Any change is a new version, which goes through the same review.

Sources

We prefer primary, official sources: laws, court and probate rules, official forms and guidance from the courts and regulators. We record each source's publisher, version and dates, and list the sources on the guide. When a law or rule we rely on changes, every guide that relies on it goes back to a lawyer for review. We do not rewrite legal guidance automatically.

Who wrote and who reviewed it

Each guide shows who wrote it and, where a legal review took place, that it was legally reviewed and when. We name a reviewer only when they have agreed to a public profile. We never show a reviewer who did not review the guide.

Review dates

“Last legally reviewed” shows the date of the last substantive legal review, not of small edits. Every guide has a date by which it must be reviewed again: six months for guides with legal detail, and a year for others.

Corrections

Every guide has a “Report an error” link for a legal error, out-of-date information or a broken source link. Our editors read every report, and anything about the law goes to a lawyer. Corrections are published as a new version, and we keep the full history of every version.

What our guides are not

Our guides are general information, not legal advice about your circumstances. Rules can differ between states, and customary or religious law can apply to some estates. Wills.ng is not a law firm. For advice about your own situation, speak to a lawyer. Read more about Wills.ng.