This is from a friend who was an attorney who once did a fair amount of estate planning in the late ‘90s in the Greater New York City area. Stick around for the punchline: “I had a client who owned brownstones in Manhattan and apartment complexes in Brooklyn and Queens. Neat guy – French aris...
If you've been reading our blog for any length of time, you know that precious little of what happens in Probate Court is private. Look at it this way, it it was we wouldn't have enough material for one blog, never mind dozens. [caption id="attachment_1507" align="alignleft" width="300"] (Photo cre...
You probably know what your house is worth at any given time. Your 401k, pension plan, bank accounts, are all easy to value, you can find them on-line in a matter of minutes. But what about personal items, especially items that we think might be valuable but are entirely dependent on the marketplace...
A lot of estates are comprised of businesses that still have to operate while the probate court does its work. And more than a few of those estates are the estates of the owner and sole decision maker of that business. That complicates matters. As it has been since the unfortunate death of Prince ea...
Sometimes the best way to understand a complex situation is to look at the worst case scenario. You know, the scenario where every possible thing that can go wrong - intentionally or accidentally - does go wrong. So, about undue influence. Here's a summary of what may well be the most egregious exam...
'Dead Hand' is not the title of one of next season's Walking Dead episodes. It is a term used to describe certain clauses in some wills and trusts. From the Beastie Boys to the great playwrights Eugene O'Neill and Edward Albee, to Franz Kafka, to parents worried about the spending habits of their a...
A conservator and a probate case that started years before death and promises to continue, in one form or the other, for years. That's the brief description of the Casey Kasem estate. The American Top 40 DJ for decades, the man with the unmistakable voice, died at age 82 in June 2014. His probate ...
Family members make a lot of promises to one another over the course of lifetimes. Not all of them are, of course, carried out. Not even the best intentioned ones. So, what happens to a mother's estate deep into the probate process when a son tries to enforce a promise given years earlier? We're ab...
We're halfway through 2017 and have covered a lot of probate issues on our blog. We thought this would be a good time to look back and review the themes and issues we've been writing about for the last six months. Fortunately for us - and very unfortunately for the executors, trustees, administrato...
We write and talk a lot about valuations during the probate process. We tend to take the valuation process a little for granted. After all, usually it's 'get the asset appraised, maybe a few times to be safe, then move on'. It's not always that easy, however. Figuring out what something is worth at...
We work with probate and wills and estates every day. Every time we think we've seen it all, something new comes up. Probate matters can cross over into almost every imaginable area of the law while, certainly, involving all manner of human emotions. Today's proof of that is the Alan Thicke estate....
Maybe in a year or so we'll be writing the final blog piece about the Prince estate. Maybe. Right now, though, a year after Prince's tragic, so untimely death, about the only thing we can say with certainty is it can't be much fun to be administrator of the his estate. You may remember from an earl...
