Aaron, if you're representing one of, let's say, two parties who want to administer a probate and they're arguing over who gets to do it, they hate each other, they both think each other is going to cheat each other, how do you use the special administrator process to at least create enough cooperation so that both parties can at least get the authority to get the property under control and perhaps sell it and then argue over the money later but not face the consequences? clock of a foreclosure? How do you work with the other attorney and or the party to make that happen?

So first, when we're talking about multiple parties competing to have control of an estate as the administrator, we're talking about a family that there's not even a will.

Because if there was a will, the will would designate.

Although even sometimes when there's a will, the people who were designated are also now gone.

either out of the area or they're also deceased.

So that's what creates a vacuum.

And increasingly, what the court will want to do in that scenario is appoint a neutral private professional fiduciary to act as special administrator.

So

They have to be able to go to an attorney, get the document prepared, and have the capacity to assent to the documents, but they may not, maybe they're blind or they're not able to physically provide for themselves for some other reason, but the mental capacity is what you're talking about when you say capacity.

Yes, I'm talking about just the same capacity we look to, for example, a client comes to us early stages of dementia maybe, but they still have the capacity to create an estate plan legally, because legal capacity is a whole different framework than medical determinations of capacity.

So that's what we're looking for.

And that's ideally if we could have somebody with capacity create a self-settled trust, that's easiest.

If they can't, then we have to go through a very long process because they may have to be conserved because they don't have capacity to create those documents.

Somebody has to be empowered to create the document for them.

And in conservatorship, it's called substituted judgment.

Is it also true in Northern California? And why do you think that is?