Australians are witnessing the greatest intergenerational wealth transfer in history. In 2018, we inherited over $120 billion in total and $125,000 on average, and our inheritances are projected to grow four-fold by 2050. This inheritance ‘boom’ is accompanied by a growth in court disputes over inheritance. In New South Wales, inheritance disputes as a percentage of all civil cases have nearly tripled since 2005. Unfortunately, inheritance litigation not only causes significant emotional stress and relationship breakdown, but also frequently generates excessive legal costs.

This world-first project applies modern behavioural economic and empirical methods to advance our understanding of inheritance litigation, in order to make it cost-effective. Its expected outcomes include behavioural economic models of inheritance litigation to predict what cost-reduction strategies will work; a large database of real-world inheritance cases to test these predictions; and robust law-reform recommendations to reduce litigation costs and delay.

Associate Professor Ben Chen is the projector’s sole/chief investigator. Drawing on his dual research doctorates in both law and economics, Ben writes in the areas of equity and trusts, succession law, civil procedure, and game theory. His publications include full-length original articles in Cornell Law Review, Economic Theory, Melbourne University Law Review (on parens patriae, class actions), and Modern Law Review. His sole-authored, practitioner-oriented articles have been cited extra-judicially by judges of the New South Wales and Queensland Courts of Appeal.

This project will take three mostly sequential steps:

(1) collect a large sample of more than 2000 judgments issued by Australian and British courts in inheritance cases, in part to discover their prominent features;

(2) develop and apply behavioural economic models which capture such prominent features to make inferences and predictions about the effectiveness of existing and new cost-reduction measures;

(3) Use the data obtained in step (1) to test the inferences and predictions made in step (2).

This project will fill important gaps in our knowledge of inheritance law and practice and produce benefits for Australian and international communities. Offering the first multi-year study of inheritance judgments for all Australian and British jurisdictions, this project will fill an important gap in our knowledge of how inheritance litigation works in practice. This project will also offer a vocabulary and a coherent theory of incentives based on deep understanding of the law, empirically grounded assumptions, formal logic, and evidence. This rigorous framework will complement and challenge what legal doctrine, common sense and experience have taught us. Moreover, the large collection of inheritance judgments to be produced will help resolve disagreements among courts and legal practitioners working in this field. This will help deter costly litigation driven by such disagreements. Finally, the law-reform and policy recommendations emanating from this project will help save money for countless families in disputes over inheritance. Reduced litigation costs will also make the justice system more accessible, especially to victims of inheritance misconduct who presently cannot afford to obtain a remedy from court.

Since the commencement of the project, Ben has developed an AI-powered empirical research app to assist with judgment data collection. Called LawtoData, this app can automatically collect judgments from Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States; and use GPT to extract and code data or information from each judgment. LawtoData is open source and publicly available for all to use.

This project is funded by an Australia Research Council (ARC) Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA), Grant ID: DE230100557