Ask 2 Lawyers: What if the Trustee Dies Before Distributing Trust Assets?

What if the trustee dies before distributing assets so Keith this is a rare occasion where this arises but it does arise from time to time where you have a trustee that's doing a darn good job of administrating the trust and then no distributions have been made yet and they kick the bucket and now they are gonna need their own trust administration but the question for you is what happens to the trust and the trust beneficiaries of the trust where the trustee passes away and I have had this happen occasionally it doesn't happen often but every now and again you do run into these problems and the first thing you do is look at the trust document who's nominated as a successor trustee and whoever's nominated the successor trustee you go to that person you say hey Stuart you're up next I want you to act as trustee and if you're willing to do it you say okay I'll do it and you accept if you say no I'm not going to do it I don't want to do it or if there's nobody named as trustee then you look at the trust document you see if the trust provides some mechanism for the beneficiaries to appoint a trustee which some trusts do most trusts don't surprisingly and so then you have to go to court and all else fails you have to file a petition in the court and ask the court to appoint a trustee and is the court most likely say you have to file a petition with the court and say hey we'd like to have Keith be our trustee if all the beneficiaries say that what's the court likely to do yeah the court won't go along with the beneficiary so if all the beneficiaries are happy with some person then the court will say fine that person can act if the beneficiaries come in and everybody's fighting the best course of action is to try and get a professional independent trustee because courts like that when you see fighting beneficiaries courts prefer to have a neutral professional active possible albertson and Davidson is here to help you fight for your inheritance check out Alda law calm for our complete library of helpful legal videos and articles from your favorite California trusts and we'll litigation law firm Ritz Inn and Davidson LLP you.