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As the title of this video suggests, we're discussing Holographic Wills, and what are those? I've done a number of these videos in the past. Holographic Wills are just handwritten Wills.

Thai Law allows for the notion of handwritten Wills. There are a variety of good reasons why the law should allow for Holographic Wills but understand, Holographic Wills are not oftentimes the optimal way of dealing with Estate planning in Thailand for a variety of different reasons most notably, state of mind comes into the issue surrounding Holographic Wills; whether or not somebody had capacity at the time that they signed a Will. When you deal with a Will that is witnessed and is filled out, dealt with by an Attorney, those kind of issues don't tend to come up because the person who is drafting the Will has had to interact with someone and that someone can basically determine whether or not that person has capacity to make that Will to begin with. So that's something to understand with respect to just Will drafting, Will formalizing sort of generally. 

The other thing to take away is look, there are some rules associated with Holographic Wills, some formalistic rules that Thai Juris, Thai Judges, and the Thai Law is concerned with, and if it's not filled out to those formalistic specifications, then it might not be usable. So a Holographic Will, look if you're like trapped - I'm not trying to make light of the circumstances of someone's passing - but let's say there's some exigent need where you feel you need to do a Will and you can't get to a law firm or you can't get to somebody to help you do it from the formalistic way, there's more than one way to do it here in Thailand; there are registration at government offices and things. But long story short, there are different ways in dealing with different types of Wills and the holographic one yes, it makes sense if you are under some sort of exigent need, or there is some sort of reason behind why you need to do it that way. As a practical matter though, it is not the optimal way to do it. There are better ways to draft Wills here in the Kingdom of Thailand.