Neil Garrett, Verisk
Posted by Neil Garrett [1], Sales Director of Claims UK at Legal Futures Associate Verisk [2].
Co-written with Neil Jones [3], Head of Claims Investigation Unit.
The year 1837 marked the beginning of the Victorian era with Queen Victoria’s accession to the British throne, sharing its moment with a significant inheritance law reform – the Wills Act 1837.
For nearly two centuries the act has governed the core framework for will-making in England and Wales, allowing testators to dictate what happens to their estate upon their death. Although the Act has been shaped by common law and statutory amendments, its fundamental structure remains in place today.
However, in May 2025 the Law Commission published a report¹ on modernising wills, alongside a draft bill intended to replace the 1837 act with a new Wills Act.² The landmark reform aims to modernise the laws governing wills through numerous amendments – including the introduction of electronic wills.³
Digitisation of wills and the risks of document fraud
The proposed bill is a significant departure from traditional wet signatures and in-person witnesses, introducing a new non-tangible avenue. Although the Law Commission has recognised that specific requirements must be necessary to ensure safety and reliability,⁴ the inclusion of digital wills and e-signatures opens the door to new vulnerabilities – digital document fraud and manipulation.
This poses a challenge for lawyers when proving authenticity. Digital impersonation of e-signatures and AI tampering could make it harder to determine whether a will is genuine, bypassing safeguards and increasing the likelihood of lengthy disputes and evidential complexity. Courts may respond by raising the bar for due diligence and expecting stronger fraud prevention measures from lawyers. While these risks are new for wills, digital fraud is a daily threat across the legal sector.
Legal representatives in the UK face growing risks from advanced documents and image fraud, driven by AI deepfakes, forged evidence, and realistic identity manipulation. The widespread increase of accessible AI and editing tools has made it simpler to create fraudulent images and documents, with advancements enabling fraudsters to bypass both human and electronic checks.
To mitigate these threats and avoid significant regulatory consequences, firms must adopt multi-layered, technology-driven verification processes that go beyond traditional paper-based checks.
AI-driven solutions for fraud detection
Neil Garrett, Sales Director of Verisk Claims, highlighted that “At Verisk, 50% of our customers recognise image and document manipulation as the most prominent emerging fraud across our databases:
1 in every 2000 images show indicators of GenAI/ similar digital manipulation
1 in every 75 – 100 images contain suspicious or consistent metadata
These findings underline the growing need for modern detection capabilities.”
Verisk’s fraud detection tools provide a layered system of defences, designed to catch fraudulent activity from multiple angles, increasing the likelihood of catching fraud on one or more counts.
With Digital Media Forensics, firms can stay ahead of evolving fraud with speed and precision, upholding legal legitimacy through the automation of unstructured data analysis.
- Document forensics spot irregularities in PDFs, such as mismatched fonts, altered dates, or overlapping text.
- Deepfake detection identifies AI-generated images, with algorithms trained to spot disparities between computer-generated and real photos.
- Image analysis utilisies metadata to detect changes in the noise pattern of photos, providing a heatmap of where edits may have occurred.
Get in touch to find out more: claimsuk@verisk.com [4]