Year: 2016

One of the great challenges in drafting any Trust is figuring out how it will work, and affect the beneficiaries, years from now. Trusts are always written today, but enforced in the future. The oldest still-operating Trust I have personally dealt with in my career was created in 1948! Circumstances…

While it may be funny to think about, you can notice your own client’s deposition if you wish to preserve his or her testimony prior to trial. This is a rarely used technique for rather obvious reasons, you do not usually want to disclose to the opposing party what your…

When a person dies owning property in his own name and has no Will, the property left behind must pass through probate before it can be transferred to the legal beneficiaries of the estate. Probate is opened and managed by an estate administrator, and the law sets out the priority…

Litigation is expensive. The chief reason for the high-cost is discovery. But discovery is a necessary part of preparing your case for settlement or trial, whichever occurs first. Motions, mediations, and trial all benefit from proper discovery being completed. Chief among the useful discovery tools is depositions. Depositions are your…

If you are going to file a civil lawsuit, you better know the burden you carry. This is particularly true in Trust and Will lawsuits, where burdens are constantly shifting back and forth depending on the claims being tried. In civil lawsuits we deal with two different types of burdens…

If a Trustee breaches a duty, what is the amount for which they are liable? The answer may surprise you. Basically, the Trustee is chargeable with three things: (1) any loss or depreciation in value incurred by the Trust, (2) any profit made by the Trustee, and (3) any profit…

You can sum up a California Trustee’s duty of care in one word: Reasonable. Well that sounds…reasonable. To be precise, California Probate Code section 16040(a) states the standard of care this way: The trustee shall administer the trust with reasonable care, skill, and caution under the circumstances then prevailing that…

Do you have anything in your past that you are a little embarrassed about, or perhaps something unpleasant such as a nasty divorce, an arrest, a bankruptcy? Everyone has something in their past that they would like to forget. And yet, when you’re in a Trust or Will lawsuit the…

Under California law you only have 120 days after receiving notice to challenge the validity of a Trust. (See Probate Code section 16061.8.) That is a bright-line deadline that cannot be changed once notice is served. Or is it? What if a Trust is revoked before death; is a 120-day…

In its simplest form, a Trust is merely the holding of money by a person for the benefit of someone else. When a friend hands you his wallet until he gets back, a Trust is formed. Trusts cannot be formed without property transferring from the hands of the owner to…