Nairobi, April 25 -- When a wealthy Kenyan dies, the battle over their estate often begins after the funeral. Bank accounts are frozen, businesses stall, and families that once appeared united fall into disputes over land, shares and control.

At the centre of many of these conflicts is a common assumption - that writing a Will is enough.

"It is not," says Njuguna Muri, an estate and succession lawyer at Muri Mwaniki Thige & Kageni LLP. "A Will is the basic. For comprehensive solutions, one may need a trust, or even engage in other more befitting arrangements such as lifetime transfers, nominations and business structuring."

From his experience, even families that have taken the step of drafting a Will still fall into predictable traps....