About us
Estates Back Office is the specialist administrative partner for law firms handling deceased estates. We do the process work behind estate administration so practitioners can focus on advice, judgement and client care.
Estates work is uniquely administrative. Between the grant application, the asset searches, the institutional notifications, the accounts and the distribution, a significant share of every matter is process rather than legal judgement — valuable work that nonetheless ties up qualified people. We exist to take that work off your desk: to give your practice extra, expert capacity that flexes with your caseload, applies a consistent process to every file, and always leaves the legal decisions with you.
We work behind your firm's brand and to your standards. Your firm remains the client's solicitor of record; we never advise your clients directly. Everything we do is performed onshore in Australia, under strict confidentiality, with secure handling of the sensitive documents an estate involves.
Estates Back Office is the specialist wills-and-estates arm of JurisIT, the legal technology, compliance and automation consultancy for small law firms: where JurisIT transforms how a firm runs on Clio and Microsoft 365, Estates Back Office runs the estates work on that platform.
Frank Downes is the founder of Estates Back Office. A practising solicitor (NSW) and IT consultant — a Clio Certified Partner and Microsoft Partner — Frank has spent his career across information technology, accounting and law, a combination that sits at the heart of a modern estates practice, where legal process, financial detail and digital assets increasingly meet.
His involvement in the estates industry goes back to his childhood. His father owned and ran a funeral monument business — still operating today, directly opposite the entrance to Woronora cemetery in Sutherland, NSW. Bereaved families would come to the office and often remark that they did not know where to start, and that the whole process felt overwhelming. What struck him even then was what came after the funeral. Once the service was over and the mourners had gone home, the family's hardest task was only beginning — the estate itself, and the exacting administration that falls to their solicitor. Now a practising solicitor (NSW) himself, Frank knows that work from the inside: the grant application, the asset and liability searches, the institutional notifications and the accounts, every step owed to a client who needs it done right.
That experience is why Estates Back Office exists: to carry the administrative weight of every estate, so the solicitor is left free for the judgement only they can bring.
We'll happily walk you through how a back office partnership works.