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...

Here's a quick story. A father runs a successful farm. He and his wife have two children, both boys, a couple of years apart. The boys grow up, go to college, go on to solid careers. Mom dies, dad remarries. The boys, now in their late forties are not happy. Dad, though, is. The boys never accept th...

We write a lot about estate disputes and litigation , , , because we are frequently involved in them. We have brought cases on behalf of beneficiaries and heirs and we have defended cases on behalf of the estate and/or executors. Every case is, of course, different, sometimes wildly so. They do shar...

Lawyers in estate planning and probate cases sometimes have a unique perspective on families and relationships. Not Tolstoy "every happy family" perspective, but a pretty in-depth perspective nevertheless. That is hardly a secret, it seems that families know it - or at least sense it - most of the t...

We, obviously I think, see a lot of disputes during the probate process. It's part of what we do day by day. We've been running a series of workshops lately with hospice workers all over the Greater Atlanta area. They ask a lot of questions about family disputes because they see it and they see the ...

A quick note about something that seems simple but always seems to get a big reaction at our workshops when we bring it up. It doesn't get laughs or comments, just a lot of people shifting in chairs and giving each other that ‘boy, have we all been through this’ look. That happens when we ta...

When we started a new series of blog posts back in April we weren't sure what direction things would go. It turns out that we hit on a few recurring themes and in looking back we realize these are themes for our times. It may seem like we wrote across a diverse spectrum of subjects - we did manage t...

Over the last few weeks we've been posting about wills, probate, the disinheriting of family members late in a testators life.This is something that's been described as a nationwide epidemic and the source of more and more probate contests and straight out litigation. Our posts are filled with examp...