Deeding property “into” and “out” of trusts is the kind of bread and butter work trusts and estates lawyers do all the time. But just because deeds-to-trust are commonplace, doesn’t mean you don’t have to sweat the details. Skip the basics of F.S. 689.07, and the property you thought was going into your trust will instead find itself in the middle of someone else’s lawsuit (see here). On the other hand, ignoring the…

Under the Florida Uniform Disposition of Community Property Rights at Death Act, married couples moving to Florida from community property jurisdictions bring their testamentary community property rights with them. This includes couples moving to Florida from any of our nine U.S. community property states, and also includes those moving to Florida from anywhere else on the planet that’s a community property jurisdiction (think virtually all of continental Europe and Latin America). These valuable…

In Florida we don’t have jury trials in will contests. But if you’re creative and the facts line up just right, your inheritance case could be decided by a jury if it’s framed as a “tortious interference with an expectancy” claim. The question then becomes, does it matter? Short answer: YES! If you think of will contests as proxies for all forms of inheritance litigation, there’s plenty of data comparing the results of jury and non-jury…

Prenuptial agreements get litigated all the time in probate proceedings. The challenge in these cases (as in all inheritance litigation) is to not let yourself get caught up in your client’s wishful thinking. Just because a certain outcome seems really unfair doesn’t mean your probate judge will (or should) rule in your favor. This may seem like an obvious point, but you’d be surprised how hard it can be not to fall into this trap…

First filed in 2014, this contested guardianship proceeding has dragged on in one form or another for six years (which is a really long time, even by guardianship standards). By now the three elderly friends at the center of this saga have all died. But a small part of their story lives on in a wonderfully detailed account of the case first published back in 2015 entitled A civil dispute over guardianship. Here’s an…

Sometimes third parties who had no knowledge of a family’s probate proceeding and wouldn’t have had standing to intervene anyway, are nonetheless adversely impacted by legally improper (and usually self serving) orders entered in these proceedings. In a lot of ways, when third parties are confronted with probate orders that are facially invalid, challenging the merits of the order is the easy part. The hard part is getting past all of the procedural hurdles protecting…