One Will or Several? The Cross-Border Will Dilemma

A client walks into your office with a simple request.

"I have a house in Mumbai, a property in London and investments in Singapore. I already have an Indian Will. My UK lawyer says I should make an English Will too. Do I really need two?"

There's no universal answer.

The instinctive response is often: one Will should be enough, why risk two documents contradicting each other. But the opposite can be just as true. A separate local Will can make administering foreign assets considerably easier.

The real question isn't whether a client should have one Will or several. It's whether the Wills — if there's more than one — have been drafted as a coordinated plan, or as two documents that happen to exist.

Indian law doesn't demand a single Will

There's no rule requiring an estate to sit inside one document.

The Bombay High Court reaffirmed exactly that recently. In Karan Shivkumar Sakhrani v. Suren Narain Advanie, decided 14 July 2026, the testator had executed two Wills covering two separate properties — signed the same day, minutes apart. The Registry objected: the later Will called itself the "last Will" and revoked earlier ones, so surely it displaced the first.

The Court rejected that. Relying on its earlier ruling in Vimla L. Rajani v. Asha Kanayalal Bajaj, it held there's no prohibition on making different Wills for different properties — and different executors can be appointed for different parts of an estate.

This isn't new. In H.H. Maharani Vijaykunverba Saheb v. Commissioner of Income Tax, the Gujarat High Court dealt with a testator holding substantial property in India and England, who had made separate Wills for each. The Court accepted that as valid: one Will for the home country, another for assets abroad.

So legally, two Wills is fine. The real question is whether it's wise.

Why bother with a separate local Will

Administration, mostly.

Say your client owns substantial immovable property in England. An English Will drafted specifically for those assets can allow the English estate to be administered separately, without necessarily bringing every foreign asset and testamentary provision into the same process. A local executor handles local property, cleanly.

The same logic extends elsewhere. A local Will can be built to satisfy that jurisdiction's execution rules and slot neatly into its probate or land-registration procedures.

But there's a distinction worth holding onto: a separate local Will doesn't automatically mean local law governs every aspect of succession. That's still a conflict-of-laws question. What the local Will buys you is a smoother administrative mechanism — not a change in which law actually decides who inherits.

Which is why "get a local Will for every country" is just as bad advice as "always have one worldwide Will."

The real danger isn't having two Wills — it's the second one

The risk isn't the existence of two documents. It's one accidentally destroying the other.

Sangha v Estate of Diljit Kaur Sangha, decided by the English Court of Appeal in 2023, is the case every cross-border lawyer should know. The deceased had made a series of Wills covering assets in India and England. A 2016 Will dealt with the Indian estate and included a standard clause: all previous testamentary documents stood cancelled.

The argument ran that the clause was obviously meant to apply only to the Indian estate, given the Will itself only dealt with Indian assets. The Court of Appeal disagreed. The revocation clause meant what it said, in full — and the fact that the later Will was made in India, about Indian assets, wasn't enough to narrow it.

The result: the earlier Will covering the English estate was gone. Revoked by a document that was never meant to touch it.

That's the trap. One lawyer updates the Indian Will. Another prepares the UK Will. Neither realises the two documents are connected — until the standard revocation clause in one wipes out the other.

The five words that can undo everything

"I revoke all previous Wills."

In a single Will, that's boilerplate — nobody thinks twice about it. In a cross-border estate, it's live ammunition.

If jurisdiction-specific Wills already exist, the lawyer drafting a new one needs to know about them before putting pen to paper. The question isn't just what the new Will should say. It's what effect it will have on everything that came before it.

Treat the Wills as a set, not as standalone documents. Their territorial scope should be explicit. Revocation clauses should be coordinated, not copy-pasted. Residuary provisions shouldn't leave gaps — or create two Wills quietly fighting over the same leftover assets. And ideally, every lawyer involved should know the others exist.

Sometimes one Will really is the right answer

None of this means a client with foreign assets needs three Wills by default.

If the foreign jurisdiction recognises the Indian Will and its local administration requirements are manageable, one carefully drafted worldwide Will can be simpler and safer. Every additional Will is another document to review, amend, and keep consistent — a cost, not just a convenience.

So the right question isn't "how many countries do you have assets in?" It's "how many separate testamentary instruments will actually make this estate easier to administer, without creating conflicting arrangements?"

What this means at the drafting stage

Before recommending a second Will, find out what the first one already does. Map the assets each document covers, the jurisdictions involved, the applicable succession and probate rules — and above all, what any revocation clause will actually do to the other documents.

If separate Wills make sense, draft them as one coordinated plan, not as independent paperwork produced in different offices, months apart, by lawyers who've never spoken to each other.

For the client with the Mumbai house, the London property and the Singapore investments, the answer might be one Will. It might be three.

What matters is that it's a deliberate choice — not an accident waiting to surface at probate.

Because the real danger in cross-border estate planning was never having two Wills.

It's having two Wills that don't know about each other.