The story, in a nutshell: we’re 99% sure that my wife’s grandmother has a will, and that it was drawn up by a lawyer in her town. Her memory’s been going for years, and she has no idea which lawyer wrote it up. She’s a fairly serious pack-rat, and finding a copy of the will among her papers would be an arduous task - assuming she has a copy somewhere in her possession.
She’s not in bad physical health for an 88 year old woman, so the need to locate the will isn’t urgent, but since we’re anticipating a need to put her in a nursing home in the next 3-6 months due to her reduced mental capacity, we’re trying to take care of as much of the planning and organizing of such things as possible.
So is there any semi-systematic way to locate the will without having to call several dozen lawyers’ offices to find out if they were the ones who did the will? Do lawyers have listservs or some equivalent that might simplify the task of alerting the local lawyers that we’re looking for grandma’s will?
She clearly lacks testamentary capacity at this point, so drawing up a new will isn’t an option.