Common Inheritance Disputes Mistakes to Avoid in Dubai
Written for families and business owners with assets in more than one jurisdiction.
The assumptions that turn a UAE estate into a family dispute: not checking which succession rules reach which assets, wills that name assets too loosely, shareholdings that contradict the company's own documents, and heirs arguing before anyone has an inventory.
Reviewed by Mohamed Noureldin, Founder, Managing Partner & Senior Legal Consultant
An estate in Dubai is rarely one estate. It is a villa on a mainland register, a shareholding in a trading company, a bank account with a single signatory, a policy written abroad, and often a will made in a home country years before the move. Each of those sits within a different set of rules, and each set of rules has its own view about who inherits and how a transfer is made.
So succession planning tends to fail at the joins rather than at the centre. The document itself is usually sound; it simply does not reach half of what the family owns, and nobody discovers that until the person who could have explained it has died. What follows are the assumptions behind the most common of those failures, and what to check in place of each.
Related: Our wills and estate planning team advises families and business owners on UAE succession.
Assuming you already know which rules govern your estate
The UAE applies more than one set of succession rules, and which applies is not a matter of preference. For Muslims, succession follows Sharia principles, which allocate defined shares among defined relatives; a will cannot simply override that allocation, though it can deal with matters the rules leave open. For non-Muslim expatriates, other routes exist, including wills registries established in the financial free zones for exactly this purpose.
The DIFC and the ADGM are common law jurisdictions with their own courts, and a will registered there is administered under those rules rather than onshore ones. This is where families are most often caught out. Registration is not a blanket exemption from the rest of the UAE legal system, and it does not automatically reach every asset the deceased owned. Before relying on a registered will, check specifically which of your assets fall within its scope — the villa registered with a mainland land department, the free zone company, the onshore bank account, the shares held abroad — and deal separately with anything that does not.
Related: We act in inheritance and succession proceedings before the UAE courts.
Writing a will that the people administering it cannot use
A will has to be operable by someone who never met you and cannot ask what you meant. Several recurring drafting habits make that impossible.
- Describing assets loosely. “My property in Dubai” is not a description a registry can act on. Identify each asset the way its own register identifies it, and revisit the list when you buy or sell.
- Naming no executor, or naming one who cannot act. The person appointed has to be willing, contactable, and able to deal with UAE institutions in practice.
- Leaving guardianship unaddressed. For parents of minor children, who cares for them, and who controls what they inherit, are two separate appointments. Families who address only the money leave the harder question to be argued over.
- Leaving old documents in circulation. A home-country will drafted before the move to the UAE, never revoked and never reconciled with a later local one, is an invitation to a dispute between two sets of beneficiaries.
Forgetting that the estate includes a business
Where the deceased held shares in a company, two documents have to agree with each other: the will and the company’s own constitutional documents or shareholders’ agreement. If the agreement says the surviving shareholders may buy out a deceased partner’s stake and the will leaves that same stake to a daughter, the family is heading for a dispute that is really a commercial one wearing family clothes.
Under the Commercial Companies Law, Federal Decree-Law No. 32 of 2021, what happens to a shareholding on death depends heavily on what the company’s own documents provide. Read them alongside the will. Decide in advance whether heirs are to receive shares, or the value of shares, and where the money to pay them out would come from. Separately, make sure the company can function while all this is resolved: a bank mandate with a single signatory, or a licence held in one person’s name, can paralyse a trading business at the worst possible moment.
Related: Where succession turns into a shareholder fight, our commercial disputes team handles the corporate side.
Arguing before anyone knows what the estate contains
A striking share of inheritance disputes are not really disputes about entitlement. They are disputes about information. One heir has been running the family business; another lives abroad and has been told nothing. Positions harden not because the shares are unfair but because nobody trusts the figures.
The corrective is unromantic and effective: a full inventory of assets and liabilities, valuations obtained from someone with no stake in the outcome, and, where accounts are contested, an accountant instructed jointly rather than by one side. Distributions built on an agreed set of numbers survive. Distributions built on one heir’s assurances get reopened.
The same logic applies to administration. Where feelings are strong, appointing an independent professional to gather in and distribute the estate removes the most common accusation in these cases — that whoever holds the assets is quietly favouring themselves.
Related: See our estate administration services for executors and heirs.
Leaving the conversation until the funeral
The most useful thing a family can do costs nothing and is rarely done: talk about it while the person whose estate it is can still explain their reasoning. Heirs contest what surprises them. An expectation set in advance — that the business goes to the child who runs it and the others are compensated in cash, that a second family is provided for, that a particular property stays undivided — is far harder to attack than the same instruction discovered after the fact.
Where relations are already strained, a structured negotiation among the heirs, conducted with each side advised and any settlement properly documented, is almost always better than the alternative. Litigation over an estate is fought between people who will still be related to each other when it ends.
Related: Our teams handle both contested inheritance claims and the contractual disputes that frequently sit behind them.
Related Services: Explore our wills, succession and estate planning work for individuals and family businesses in the UAE.
Disclaimer: The information provided in this article is for general informational purposes only and does not constitute legal advice. Readers should seek professional legal advice tailored to their specific circumstances before making any decisions or taking any action based on the content of this article.
Nour Attorneys Team
Additional Resources
Explore more of our insights on related topics:
