Probate Practitioners Conference

Dan joined the Quality Assurance Department (QAD) of ICAEW in 2017, having previously been a manager in the audit practice of a national firm. He manages QAD’s probate monitoring as well as leading a team of reviewers who carry out audit, Practice Assurance (PA) and DPB monitoring visits to a range of firms. He is also involved with our third-party contracts with The Institute and Faculty of Actuaries as well as with other regulators based overseas. Dan also manages QAD's Licensed Practice monitoring for firms registered as ATOL Reporting Accountants.

Professor Lesley King is a former member of the Probate & Estates Committee of STEP, a former member of the Law Society’s Wills & Equity Committee and an honorary member of the Association of Contentious Trust and Probate Specialists. She is Professional Development Consultant at the University of Law.

She is co-author of Wills, Taxation and Administration: A Practical Guide; A Modern Approach to Wills, Administration and Estate Planning (with Precedents);  A Modern Approach to Lifetime Tax Planning for Private Clients (with Precedents); A Practitioner’s Guide to Wills; Varying the Disposition of an Estate after Death; Wills: A Practical Guide; and editor of The Probate Practitioner’s Handbook.

She is a contributor to the Wills and Trusts volumes of Halsbury’s Laws and the Encyclopaedia of Forms and Precedents and to The Law and Ethics of Dementia. She is the wills and probate columnist for the Law Society Gazette, and writes and lectures extensively on wills, taxation and related matters.

Pat is a tax consultant lecturer at Mercia Group. Pat originally trained and worked in the profession for Ernst & Young, Grant Thornton and KPMG before moving to the University of Derby as their senior tax lecturer. Her time at Derby included undergraduate and professional tax training as well as being involved in examinations and publishing projects for ACCA and other professional bodies.

This led to a ten-year period with the Financial Training Company (now Kaplan) where she was Tax Product Director for the Midlands as well as becoming well known as a prominent exam-based tax lecturer. Over her career Pat has been actively involved in the tax professional bodies including serving as a Council member for 12 years for the Association of Taxation Technicians.

Andy has been a technical consultant with Mercia and before that Swat since 2000. For much of that time he was Head of Publications with responsibility for all the audit and compliance manuals, including the anti-money laundering and probate manuals. He was also Swat's and Mercia’s Money Laundering Reporting Officer for a few years. Before joining Swat he spent a number of years with a top 20 firm as an Audit Manager and then Technical and Training Manager followed by a period as a sole practitioner and then a partner in a small practice in the South West.