Blog Posts About Estate Planning Malpractice

After handling many hundreds of Trust and Will contest cases, we can tell you that disinheriting a child is not about the money.  Well it is about keeping money from them, but the child sees it as so much more.  Distrust, betrayal, danger, a lack of love or approval; these…

Yes.  In America, you can take almost any legal action on your own, even representing your self in court.  Of course, the old saying is “he who represents himself has a fool for a client.”  That may be true in some complicated legal matters, but there are plenty of simple…

Contesting Wills and Trusts can be difficult because each document operates under a different set of rules. And each document has a different statute of limitations for contesting it. Timeline for California Will Contests You really cannot contest a California Will until someone offers the Will to be admitted into…

Who has the right to challenge a Will, or a Trust for that matter? To challenge a Will or a Trust in California, the person filing the Trust or Will contest lawsuit must have legal standing to do so. The concept of standing has evolved from centuries of jurisprudence, first…

What can you do when you find yourself left out of a parent’s Will? That all depends on the circumstances surrounding the creation of the Will in the first place. For starters, in California children do not have a right to inherit any property from a parent. In other words,…

Fun fact: Trusts are not testamentary documents. That means Trusts do not have to follow all of the strict rules required to make a valid Will. Wills require a written document, signed by the decedent and witnessed by two witnesses…not so for Trusts. Trusts fall into a broad category of…

Generally, estate planning attorneys who draft California Trusts and Wills can only be sued for legal malpractice by the client who hired them. But there is a narrow exception to this general rule where an estate planning attorney’s mistake harms “intended beneficiaries” of the Trust or Will—even though the intended…