When families discover that a deceased loved one had unclaimed or abandoned assets, one of the first questions they often ask is: “Why didn’t the attorney find this?” It’s a fair question—after all, estate attorneys handle probate, inheritance transfers, and legal oversight. However, locating unclaimed funds is not typically part of the legal responsibilities assigned to an attorney during estate administration.
Attorneys focus on the legal processes required to settle an estate. This includes filing the will, managing probate court documents, resolving debts, distributing property, and ensuring compliance with state law. Their scope does not generally include deep investigative searches across federal, state, and private databases for abandoned or unclaimed assets. In fact, most unclaimed property departments do not notify attorneys, and there is no centralized system that automatically alerts legal professionals about missing assets tied to an estate.
Furthermore, unclaimed money does not always appear under the estate’s current address or even the deceased’s last known residence. Abandoned assets can be tied to old jobs, forgotten bank accounts, prior insurance policies, utility refunds, safe-deposit boxes, or businesses from decades earlier. These assets often “slip through the cracks” long before probate begins—and unless someone is specifically searching for them, they remain hidden.
Unlike legal offices, professional investigators use specialized skip tracing tools, proprietary databases, and investigative techniques to uncover assets that standard probate procedures cannot detect. At WeFoundYou!, our business model is built around locating exactly these kinds of overlooked funds. We perform multi-layered searches, cross-reference data, and verify leads that go far beyond what a traditional estate attorney is required—or equipped—to do.
Another point to consider is timing. Many assets become classified as “unclaimed” years after inactivity. That means an attorney may have closed probate long before funds were ever turned over to a state or government agency. Because of this delay, the attorney would have had no way of knowing the assets existed.
In short: attorneys handle the legal settlement of the estate; investigators locate missing assets that fell outside the legal process. Both roles are essential, but they serve very different purposes. If you’ve been contacted about unclaimed money, it doesn’t mean something was overlooked—it simply means the discovery happened outside the attorney’s role. And that’s exactly where our expertise begins.