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...
There's a matter headed for a probate court in Tennessee that will probably end up encapsulating many of the issues we've been writing about all year. It's very early in the process and not even all the legal issues seem to have been identified yet, but it promises to tick off a lot of the boxes we ...
We haven't talked about relatives in awhile. That hit home seeing some write-ups of the recent release of the biography of Laura Ingalls Wilder, the author of the Little House on the Prairies books - you know, the books the TV series was based on. Not exactly an article that would normally make one ...
HBO's Six Feet Under was one of the most acclaimed TV shows in recent memory, though somewhat under the radar, obscured a bit by the big hits like The Sopranos and Mad Men. It's the story of a family owned funeral home. Each episode began with a death, the deceased would end up at the Fisher Funeral...
How important is the handling of debt during the probate process? Well, let's put it this way, probate courts probably wouldn't exist as we recognize them today if it weren't for the question of debt after death. Wills have been around since ancient times. They go back to the Greeks and Romans. One...
