Transcript of the above video:

As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing Thai Wills. Now Codicil is what we sometimes call an amendment if you will to a Thai Will. It basically will just sort of add on stipulations to an already existing Will. Now this is what we call it in the Common Law tradition. You have a Will and then you have a Codicil.

Now you can do things similar to that in Thailand but after talking with Thai Attorneys here in our office, to be clear I am not a Thai Attorney, I am an American Attorney; I'm a naturalized Thai citizen; I am the Managing Director of our firm but my staff, they end up vetting these videos, these are for informational purposes only. After talking to the staff here in our office that assist with Wills we were talking about and I said "do you recommend doing" because somebody asked, a couple of people actually asked about doing Codicils to their Wills. Here in Thailand, again it gets into a bit of a more nebulous area of legal analysis if you are talking about a Will that might be used in multi-jurisdictions or a Will that is going to only be used in another jurisdiction, but for Thailand when you talking about a Thai Will, generally speaking the consensus here among lawyers in our office is rather than doing something akin to a Codicil that thereby amends a Will, generally better to just draft a whole new instrument. Now if you are using the same lawyer you have used before, that may be a relatively straightforward process because they may have on file your old testamentary instrument and they can kind of work off of that. We do redrafts of Wills rather frequently for clients if their circumstances materially change, oftentimes if they lose a loved one or if their marital situation changes we will oftentimes engage in the drafting of a new Will. 

Based on what I have talked to with my colleagues here in the firm, generally speaking they believe that re-drafting a new instrument is better than trying to amend it through Codicil, what we would call Codicil, here in Thailand because the systems are not completely congruent on this. In Thailand, the sort of consensus needs to be that 'Look just write a whole new instrument. Rather than mess around trying to figure out intent between the amendment versus the original document, just do a whole new instrument. Come up with something, draft something that you will then replace the previous one with so it is just clean and clear what the exact intentions are of that person who is trying to go ahead and draft and implement a Will here in the Kingdom of Thailand'.