The Trustee Must Pay! How do you go About Surcharging a California Trustee?

[Music] I just Keith Davidson at Albertson and Davidson in this video we're discussing trustee surcharge how do you hold your trustee liable for the damages that they have caused to your trust estate and the number one way that you hold a trustee liable is you have to go to court on a petition asking the court to order the trustee to pay damages back to the trust that's what we call a surcharge and you're allowed to ask for a surcharge for any harms and losses that the trustee is caused to your trust estate you usually start by filing a petition with the court asking the court to order a surcharge against the trustee but you have to know what it is you want surcharge so if you know that the trustee has caused damage by taking a specific act and you know how much damage the trustee is caused then you can go straight forward file your petition and ask the court to order the trustee to pay that back if however you're unclear as to the damage that the trustee did then you're gonna have to do a little bit more than that and that comes in a couple of different ways one way is you could file a petition asking the court to order the trustee to account so then the trustee has to do a formal trust accounting and that essentially will become your roadmap for whatever the trustee surcharges will be because in that accounting you should be able to see where the problems arose also using that accounting you can start doing discovery issuing subpoenas getting bank records getting financial statements getting records from escrow companies and you can start piecing together the information yourself and finding out where the damage occurred to your trust once you have that information then you can ask the court to order the surcharge so it really depends on what information you have heading into the case the more information you have the more likely you are to go straight into the petition asking for a surcharge the less information you have your I have to take the first step of becoming informed and then you can sue the trustee for surgery. [Music] [Applause] [Music]