Probate and Fiduciary Litigation | with Nicholas Van Brunt

One of the challenges I see also with wills and trust error disputes is that sometimes you have multiple errors, four or five siblings or whatever, and one's filing as a petitioner and maybe has the estate paying for an attorney to guide.

And then one of the heirs feels they're being taken advantage of but doesn't have the resources to hire an attorney.

And that's a tough attorney to find, right? Because if it's not really a dispute, it's not really litigation, it's not really administration, they can blow into full litigation and no attorney wants to sign on.

So you must see those either you get into them accidentally or you watch them on the side.

What advice would you give to that heir who on one hand is being taken advantage of, on the other hand, hiring an attorney for them is a very uncertain and can be very expensive proposition?

Yeah, it certainly can.

And there are people in the probate bar who will take matters on contingency, meaning that they'll take a percentage of whatever favorable outcome.

I don't know that many people do it, but I do know people who do it.

It's a little bit of a trap for the unwary.

I can think of one real-life example where, and we came into this case later on, but in a situation where one beneficiary is like, I want to remove my brothers as trustees.

I want to remove them, but I can't afford counsel.

So he hires a contingency lawyer, and the contingency lawyer does a little bit of work, and ultimately negotiates a resolution whereby the brothers agree to step down from one of the two trusts, actually, not from both trusts.

And the engagement letter said we'll take 25%, I think it was, of the beneficial interest Let's just say, I'm not going to say exactly, let's just say this is a multi-million dollar trust.

Okay.

Or multi-million dollar trust in aggregate.

And, you know, for a little bit of work and just getting someone to agree to step down from one of the trusts, they were taking the position that they're now entitled to a quarter of the trust, the entire trust.

Ultimately resolved it for much less than that.

But it's, you know, I mean, that that's sort of the trap of the unwary.

So you know, I do think that there's a risk when you have a contingency arrangement.

I do see that that some lawyers are out there asking for contingencies on things that people are going to get anyway.

And the contingency should really be only on what you wouldn't be getting but for the fact that you entered in the case, right? So if you already have a million dollar interest in the trust, and you recover two million, the contingency should be on that second million, not on the

entire

amount.

That's the risk out there.

But yeah, I mean, sure, it's a, The deck can be stacked.