We just posted a link to a Wall Street Journal article about the pitfalls of being an executor. There are more than a few and even experienced financial professionals can run afoul of the sometimes arcane rules. By the way, these pretty much apply to trustees as well. Our blog posts over the last f...
We were looking back on some of the probate cases we've written about over the last year and, sure enough, one of them had a significant update in the last month or so. It casts the spotlight on the duties of executors/trustees. It is the Alan Thicke estate. You may recall that Alan Thicke died sud...
You hear about simple wills all the time. Usually, it means someone executed ‘just’ a will, a will that took care of everything without the need for trusts. You know, simple. We find that a lot of people also think: simple will, simple probate, no problems, no worries. It’s a natural enough as...
We just did a Facebook post about an article in the Washington Post last week about Prince's estate - it was the two year anniversary of his death last Sunday. The title was: What would Prince want? A really evocative headline, to be sure. Prince, as you know, died unexpectedly and without a will. A...
We did something we never do last week, we posted a story on Facebook that had nothing to do with probate ... but everything to do with families. It was a story in Golf Magazine, of all things, about the man who just won The Masters, Patrick Reed. It detailed a series of family events over the ye...
It’s been two years since we started a different tack with our blog posts and began to write about probate cases and issues in the news (past and present) and popular culture. We were going to do a little ‘best of’ review this week when we run across a feature article in last week’s New York...
You hear about simple wills all the time. Usually, it means someone executed ‘just’ a will, a will that took care of everything without the need for trusts. You know, simple. We find that a lot of people also think: simple will, simple probate, no problems, no worries. It’s a natural enough as...
What about a probate case where the deceased was a French citizen living in the United States for tax reasons who left a California will bequeathing his French property to his fourth wife? Now add this - that will disinherited his two children from his first wife, a violation of French law, and the ...
Through a month of Facebook postings - and a few blogs - we realized that if you looked at them all together, at once, we were really running a commentary about being an executor. It just seemed that every story either directly or indirectly pivoted around an executor's duty to the estate. One ...
A big probate story out of California this week has been all over the news. It's a bit different and certainly highlights some very common probate themes in a very unorthodox way. There's - apparently- very few assets to value, no operating business, perhaps no real heirs, probably no will. There i...
Not sure if we've ever really covered pre-existing contracts in a probate case before, aside from obliquely mentioning contracts and probate in the same post. That changes now because of a very high profile estate dispute that's all over the media. We're glad it's out there because it's an excellent...
Happy 2018! Our best wishes for a Happy and Healthy New Year. We published a year end video on Facebook, this is a quick review of the themes we covered on the blog in 2017. Our year of writing was greatly assisted by celebrities. Unfortunately for them, of course, but perfect, timely, and very rel...
