Stay on Track: Why won’t your California Trustee just follow the law?

In this video, partner Keith A. Davidson discusses the difficulties some Trustees have just doing the right thing and following California Trust law.

The following is a transcript of this video:

You’re entitled to a distribution and you should receive it within a reasonable time. Typically, that’s going to be within a year or less, depending on the complexities of the estate.
The problem is is that if you want to receive your trust share but you don’t want to go to court, you really have very few options. You could send a letter to the trustee, you could try to talk to them, you could plead with them, you can threaten them. But, really, none of that’s going to work at the end of the day because you can’t force a trustee to act outside of court.

Now once you go to court, now you have all sorts of options. You can get the judge to order the trustee to do things. You can see their removal. You can try to hold them liable for damages. You can issue subpoenas. You can take depositions. A whole world of devices opens up to you that will help you get through this problem and ultimately get the distribution that you deserve.

But, when you’re looking at a case, pre-litigation, before we actually file in court, you can certainly write some letters. And a lot of times people think, well, maybe if I just hired a lawyer to write a letter. But I got to tell you, trustees will ignore any letter, even a letter from a lawyer. All they have to do is throw it away and there’s no consequences. And that’s the problem with trying these things outside of court.

But, every case is different. If somebody just needs a little prodding, or a little handholding. Maybe you can get your trustee to do the right thing without going to court. But if that doesn’t work, unfortunately, Probate Court, where you file trust cases, that’s probably the only way that you’re going to get anything moving in your favor.