Do I always have to go to court?

[Music] This is Stuart Albertson with Albertson and Davidson the question today is do we always have to go to court to get my interest that's due to me under a trust for example say that you're the 50% beneficiary of a trust but the trustee refuses to distribute your assets to you it's been three years since your mom or dad passed away and there's no reason for your sibling the trustee to be hanging on to these assets they could be spending these assets on themselves they're treating these assets as if they're their own when you're the rightful owner of these assets and these assets should be distributed out to you I get clients to say but can't we just tell a judge this has to happen we'd have to file anything can we write him a letter what can we do to get these assets and unfortunately the answer is you do need to go to court especially in light of a set of facts where you've been the beneficiary of a trust for more than three years and your sibling is refusing to make that distribution to you we'd like to think we still live in an era where letters work or phone calls work or persuasion works it doesn't for most cases I've been doing this for a lot of years and I can think of one time in my entire career that a letter worked so we generally want to send one letter to just see if that will work it almost always isn't and that you're gonna have to go to court and get a judge to order that trustee sibling to make your rightful distribution to. [Music] [Applause] [Music]