Your Lawsuit Has Left the Building…What is Your Deadline to File a Trust or Will Lawsuit?

[Music] Hi this is Stewart Albertson with Albertson and Davidson and I want to talk to you about an issue that we are seeing more and more of and that has to do with statutes of limitation statute limitations being the time period that you're allowed to bring a lawsuit whether it's in probate court or civil court what we're seeing is and this video may be more to the practicing attorneys out there but it's also something that beneficiaries want to be aware of we're seeing people miss these statute of limitations in trust and well cases and we believe the reason for that is is because it's a complex analysis to determine what particular statute of limitation applies at what particular time at what particular proceeding in a trust and will contest matter let me give you an example from another area of law to show you why we're having issues with the trust and estate statutes and we're seeing those come up more often where people are making mistakes let's talk about personal injury personal injury is very simple if somebody crashes into you in a car if somebody punches you in the face you have two years to bring a lawsuit against that person before the statute of limitation runs in other words you can do anything you want for up to two years as long as you file your lawsuit before the end of two years you can bring a personal injury action against the person who hurt you well let's come back to trust in a state law now it's not that simple there's various national limits that apply at different times let's talk about the bright-line statute of limitations pertaining to decedent's the general rule is is that when someone dies and everyone should know when someone dies that's pretty easy to ascertain you have one year to make a claim against that person but that one year can be shortened to as little as a hundred and twenty days depending on the circumstances if a petition for probe goes out and you have a will that's admitted into probate once that's admitted into probate now you have a hundred and twenty days to file a claim against the decedent to make matters worse if you're doing a certain type of claim against the decedent you're gonna have to file what we call a creditors claim in the probate estate of the decedent and you're gonna have to file a lawsuit all before the end of the claim period running in other types of cases you only have to file the creditors claim but you can file a lawsuit after a year and so this becomes confusing to many lawyers as it may be to you now as I'm trying to explain it there's also another complication where you have financial elder abuse claims this is where someone has done a wrongful taking against somebody that's a dependent adult or somebody that's older than 65 years of age in California we don't want people abusing our elders we don't want them taking their finances in a wrongful taking so the statute allows us to sue somebody the wrongdoer in that case for up to four years after the wrongful taking so we literally can have four years going by and as long as we get the financial elder abuse case on file before the four years runs chances are we beat that statute of limitations however if you were given statutory notice under a trust which gives you 120 days within which to file a trust contest and you do not file that trust contest within 120 days you may be precluded from filing a financial elder abuse claim even though it gives you four years one more thing to add and that would be what if the drafting attorney the attorney that drafts the Trust's are well what if they have made a mistake and they've hurt you as an intended beneficiary of that estate plan in that case you have one year from date of notice that you knew you were harmed by the attorneys drafting to file a legal malpractice case against that attorney if you don't have notice and you discover it later more than one year after the event took place you may be able to argue you didn't have actual knowledge or that you shouldn't have known about the harm took place and you may be able to use a four year statute of limitations to sue the attorney for legal malpractice the whole point of this video is not for you to understand all of these varied statute of limitations some as short as 120 days some as long as a year some as long as four years is to show you that there's complexity in each one of these trusts of state cases you need to have expert analysis of your case so that somebody can see what the facts and circumstances are and what statute limitations are going to apply to your case moving forward if you miss a statute chances are you're going to be barred forever from bringing your claim forward so even though these are complex difficult to understand it's something at the very beginning of a case you have to spend the time to understand make sure you're not missing anything especially on the shorter ones such as the 120 days because that one comes and goes very quickly hopefully I haven't confused you too much I've confused myself a little bit going over all this all I want to point out is this is a complex area the statute of limitations in trusting of state matters make sure you get somebody that's qualified to explain them to you and you understand the time limits you have to bring your claim forward in either probate court or so [Music] [Applause] [Music]