Big Fight, Small Estate…Should You Fight for a Small Inheritance?

[Music] Hi this Keith Davidson with Albertson and Davidson and in this video I want to talk about the costs of a trust or will contest the question were asked quite often is should I bring my will or trust contest if the estate isn't worth very much money and unfortunately if you're going to take on the burden of trying to contest a trust or a will that burden does come with a significant cost but of course there's also the principle involved and so a lot of times people will say well I'm not fighting this trust of we'll just for the money or at all for the money I'm fighting it for the principle because I know that my mother and father would not have disinherited me if they had been in the right mind or if they had not been under the undue influence of a bad actor and I can definitely empathize with that principle because that happens all too often but if you're going to stand up and make sure that that principle is enforced in the in your parents estate then you're gonna have to take on the burden of that fight too and keep in mind that a trust or will contest can cost anywhere from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars because there's so much you have to go through in court to successfully contest a will or a trust for example every trust or will contest you have to hire an expert a medical doctor usually to testify either to capacity or to the susceptibility of undue influence experts are expensive a single expert and just one case can cost twenty to thirty thousand dollars or more depending on how much that expert is used and that doesn't take into account the attorneys fees the deposition cost and all the other subpoena costs that go along with litigation and so some litigations might come in on the quote-unquote cheap side of twenty-five to thirty five thousand whereas others can go to seventy-five or eighty five thousand and others can be two hundred and fifty thousand it all depends on what you're up against in your estate fight but in any event it's not a small amount of money that you're going to have to pay to fund these fights so the question becomes how much is this principle worth to you and what are your resources to be able to enforce that principle now the other alternative if you can't pay for your litigation is to higher a lawyer such as our firm on a contingency basis and we do quite a bit of contingency work as well but even a contingency arrangement where you give the attorneys a percentage of what's recovered and you don't have to pay if there's no recovery can still be expensive at the end of the day if the lawyers are successful in recovering money for you it has the benefit of course of you not having to pay any of the costs out of your own pocket but if there is a recovery then the fee can be again quite substantial so at the end of the day it's a personal decision you have to decide for yourself is this fight worth the burden and the cost that you're going to take on to take on that fight or is it not and only you can answer that question so that's some information on some of the financial aspects of a trust or world contest [Music] [Applause] you.