Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
And we're going to talk about some things today that
I think will be of interest to you because we're
going to talk about some cases that are firm handles,
that are just cases you don't want to be in.
And we're going to talk about some celebrities that you
may recognize and the things that they've done are not done.
But the theme today is how to punish your family
(00:21):
when you die? So it's kind of an ominous theme, right,
why would I ever punish my family when I die?
But here's the main reason I hear why families end
up in crisis, and that is, well, I'm not going
to do anything, let them worry about it. And how
many people just don't do a plan, basic simple things.
(00:42):
Do a will? We like trusts? How do you keep
your family safe? How do you make sure that you
are safe if you become incapacitated. How do you know
that your assets are going to be managed properly, You're
going to get the care that you need, and you're
going to have your life play out in a way
that is favorable to you that you can direct the show,
(01:04):
And we talk about writing your own script. Well, a
lot of the cases we're going to talk about today
are unscripted. They end up in court and now you
have a judge who's going to write an order, and
that order becomes your script. Trust me, folks, you don't
want to be there. So I'm very happy today to
have Liven studio with me. One of our associates who
(01:25):
handles all of these messes, Brent Stak, Good morning, Brent,
Good morning, Lou.
Speaker 2 (01:29):
How are you.
Speaker 1 (01:29):
I'm doing fine today. I'm all pumped up. I think
this is a great show. It's a great topic. We've
done this topic before. One of our other associate attorneys
who does a state administration with us, Adriana Mahalik, was
here and she and I went through a bunch of
cases and a bunch of things that we've worked on.
And I know you have cases that you've worked on.
And we're working on getting our other associate who's going
(01:52):
to join us from our New York City office, and
we may have him on now. Thumbs up from the
engineer Burly Brown, Good morning from Hey. We're good here.
We're here in the warm studio, no chilli outside, little
windy outside. I had a big tree, like a thirty
(02:12):
foot tree fall on my property last night and I
woke up at two in the morning going boom, and
I looked out and there's the tree. It was really yeah,
So now I got to call somebody come and cut
it up and all that fun stuff. But that's you know,
life in the Great Northeast. You get cold wind and
knocks down trees. Today. Really and really, I'm going to
(02:33):
introduce you to our audience because I don't believe you've
been on the show yet.
Speaker 3 (02:37):
No, I am not first time.
Speaker 1 (02:40):
Brent's been here at least once or twice a few times,
a few times. We're Aaron Connor, my partner, and Verly,
just tell our listeners a little bit about yourself. You
work out of the Manhattan office, You're a marathon or
just ran the Chicago Marathon. New grandfather, new grandfather, You
look too young to be a grandfather, but your experience,
(03:01):
I think will lend great credibility and wait to today's show
in the courts and your experience as an attorney. So
just give our audience a little bit about what Burly
Brown is all about.
Speaker 3 (03:11):
Sure so yes. In addition to all of the marathon
and new grand baby events that have been happening in
my life, I've been practicing in the trust in the
States area for about sixteen or so years, and you know,
primarily focused on a state administration and a state litigation.
(03:34):
So I've I've seen quite a lot in this practice area,
a lot of interesting matters and a lot of examples
that we can definitely share it today on this LUs
radio show. So talk a little bit about my professional background.
To sort of keep track on the marathon thing. I
(03:57):
don't know if I told you guys did, but I'm
to be running the Tokyo Marathon in March. So that's
the next the next thing on my marathon my marathon highlights.
Speaker 1 (04:08):
I had not heard that, but congratulations is that one
that you have to qualify for? And I guess your
time in Chicago got you there.
Speaker 3 (04:16):
No, that's so. I basically I like to run for
charitable organizations to promote a good cost. So the charity
that I ran for in Chicago, I'm running for them
again in Tokyo because I like the organization and the
and the work that they do.
Speaker 4 (04:35):
Cool.
Speaker 1 (04:36):
And you've been in the court system before as well,
and we're going to talk a lot about the court
system today and what that means for families when they
get caught in that court system in proceedings that are
not smooth at times. So what was your experience really
in the courts dealing with the states and trusts.
Speaker 3 (04:55):
Well, you're you're exactly right, Lou. When proceedings come in
that are not sloth, it can be extremely difficult to
get through the court process, especially when you have complicated
family dynamics and everyone isn't in agreement with the with
the proceeding that is being brought in court. So my
(05:18):
motto is, if you can avoid probates, avoid probates. And
I guess that's will be part of the discussion today
about you know, the probate process, the difficulties of that,
and why it makes sense to either have a really
good estate plan or better yet, just avoid the probate
court altogether.
Speaker 1 (05:39):
Yeah. And I know in certain courts there are even
on a good day, even with a perfectly clean estate,
as we say, where you know all the beneficiaries, everybody's signs, waivers,
you're going for just a standard letters testamentary, the wait
times in certain courts can be terribly.
Speaker 3 (05:57):
Frustrated, exactly exactly right, And you know it's it's it's
interesting because you would think that is a very straightforward
probate matter would just float through and and and and
get to the end very quickly. But the problem is
in most courts when they have a backflog, whether it's
(06:19):
a complicated case or a straightforward case, everything's falled in
the pile and you essentially wait your turn, So your
matter can be sitting on the clerk's desk in the
pile for several weeks before anyone even looks at it,
even if it's a very straightforward and simple probate proceeding.
Speaker 2 (06:40):
So ill that I call that pile a black hole?
Speaker 3 (06:46):
Yes, exactly, the Berma triangle.
Speaker 1 (06:49):
Yes, yes, So I have a case that I'm involved in.
I'm not the attorney for the estate, but I was
asked to be a co executor. And this is a
an estate that has a property in Manhattan, and Verly
is familiar with this case. He's actually scoped out the
property because we want to sell. We want to sell
the property. In order to sell the property, it was
(07:10):
in the decedent's name alone. If it wasn't a trust,
the property would have been sold two years ago. But
it's it's in the decedent's name, so it's in an
a state, and the estate had an attorney that was
representing a gentleman who is an Italian citizen, has no
US contacts, but is the beneficiary of the estate, and
became the co executor. He could not be the sole executor.
And the attorney petitioned for probate and got letters testamentary,
(07:33):
and they were proceeding on and the attorney that asked
me to step in did so because the attorney that
was probating the estate died. So life happens and so
does death, and so that attorney is out of the picture.
And the attorney that was petitioning the court then filed
a supplemental petition simply to have me substituted in for
(07:56):
the deceased attorney. That request has been sitting on the
judge's desk for nine months, not nine weeks. Nine months.
In the meantime, this building sits vacant. The executor in
Italy saying, I hate America. You know this is I'm
tied up in the court. I have no idea why,
(08:16):
and it's you know, it's a several million dollar building
that he's going to get the proceeds from. So in
court that's kind of what we're facing, and it doesn't
have to be a lot of money. In fact, the
cases that often present the thorniest problems are the cases
with very little money, perhaps just a house. And I'll
tell one of my other war stories and then we're
(08:37):
going to open up the phone line. So stay tuned, folks.
But I had a client. It's a long story. It
would take me several days to unwind this whole story.
It went through several court proceedings, permutations, but at the
end of the day, the gentleman was really alone. Had
his parents had passed away, his brother had passed away,
It was just him. He's living in his own home.
(08:58):
He was on Medicaid and so he was living with
some home health aids at home. And he wanted to
sell the house and move into assisted living. And so
he had a friend, a neighbor who had taken a
power of attorney and was doing the sale of the
house for him. They had a contract for sale and
(09:19):
they were ready to go to closing and he died. Well, gentlemen,
what dies with you in that scenario that I just described,
I mean all of it, your power of attorney? Yeah, exactly,
So who is the executor of the estate named in
the will that some dummy drafted me so executive. So
(09:43):
I had to go and I had to probate the
will to get authority to sell the house. And I
had a contract sitting on my desk. This buyer was
ready and hot to buy the house. Interest rates were low.
Everything was good, except he had no parents, he had
no spouse, he had no siblings. I had to find
(10:05):
his heirs in order to get probate, because folks, you
have to serve every distributee everybody who is a natural heir,
and in this case, it was cousins and relatives. He
didn't know. I didn't know, so we basically had to
do a whole genealogical search because I couldn't get the
will probated and I couldn't get in to get authority,
(10:27):
and I applied for temporary letters and that just sat too.
But I was stuck. So what happens. Interest rates pop,
they go way up, the buyer backs out, we lose
the contract. There would have been some equity in the
house under that initial contract, because there was a mortgage
on it. There would have been equity by the time
(10:48):
I got to sell the house. A year later, the
equity was gone because the market had tanked. And so
here we are trying to sell the house. Medicaid wants
their share. The woman who had been taking care of
him and it had been selling the house and was
a real estate broker, wanted her share. I'm trying to say, Okay,
we need to get some kind of attorney sees out
of this. I'm working my tail off trying to find
(11:09):
all of these damn heirs and there's just no money.
And that's what you end up with in probate. You
don't have control. Yeah, you don't have control. So we're
going to take a quick break. When we come back Verly,
I want to start with one of your cases and
then give us a call. Folks, if you have questions
on a state administration. You got three lawyers that are
battling it out in courts. We do guardianship, and Brent's
(11:33):
going to talk about some of the guardianship litigation that
we do. We do a state and trust litigation. Today
is how to punish your family when you die, and
we're going to show you all the ways that people
have done it, but more importantly, how you can avoid it.
So stay with us we'll be back after this short
break and we are back. Welcome back to life happens.
(11:54):
I'm Lupiro all fired up today. Too much caffeine. No,
this is natural to you. I didn't have that fourth
cup of coffee today. So these topics and I start
as we were preparing for the show, I just the
memory banks just started to roll in all these cases,
these past cases where people just got destroyed in court
(12:16):
and the family is after two three years of proceedings
and litigation. That just blows the family up. And you
don't want to have your family in that situation. So
I'm going to open up the phone lines. We'll take
your calls eight hundred eight two, five fifty nine forty nine.
And if you've called the show before, it's eight hundred
talk WGY. But I'm gonna give it to you one
(12:38):
more time in numbers eight hundred eight two five, five
nine four nine. Give us a call. We're here, three
lawyers ready to serve you. I don't think we can
charge for these coms now, so it's for free. You know,
you get free legal advice on the radio. No, it's
not legal advice that we do. That disclaimer before and
after the show. We cannot give you legal advice on
(12:59):
the radio, so we'll answer questions as best we can. So, really,
you have a case which is a protracted estate litigation.
This one did have money, had like thirty million dollars,
So just tell us a little bit about it and
where that went and why it went sideways.
Speaker 3 (13:15):
So, yeah, this is this is actually a pretty tragic story.
A husband and wife had two young daughters. White was
found dead by the pool one morning. Her husband was
probating her estates didn't do much of it because he
got sick during the process and then he died. So
(13:40):
they did have wills, but their wills were poorly drafted.
No one made any real provisions for the children. The
distribution of a state assets was was extremely complicated because
most of them that estimated thirty million dollars estate asset
was the compound that they lived on, and it was
(14:04):
just a very difficult estate to administer because it was
real estate rich but cash for Then the daughters turned
around and ensued the the the estate fiduciary who was
a cousin of their mother, and that litigation was protracted
(14:27):
and nasty for at least ten years. It recently settled,
and and and and that's litigation that could have been
avoided with the appropriate planning. It This was this was
the perfect estate that should have been set up in
a trust or trust for the wife and a husband,
(14:47):
with further trust for the for the daughters, where these
decisions would have been in place instead before having to
go to court to try to figure out how to
navigate the litigation that these these young girls brought to
the estate. And a lot of that was was just
the you know, the the trauma of having lost their
(15:07):
parents back to back. But again another example of having
your your your personal life litigated in the court. And
this is one of those cases that was so litigious
and and and so interesting that it actually made the news.
(15:28):
It was in two newspapers, one pretty well known newspaper
and one local newspaper in there in their community. So
the moral of that story and and and I always
tell clients this is plan, plan, plan, avoid probate as
much as you can, and if you have complicated family dynamics,
(15:51):
make that part of your estate plan as well, because
this particular case was just one of those that it
really was actually because of the extreme lack of planning
with individuals who have significant network, and so.
Speaker 1 (16:07):
That case raises several issues, So let's unpack that a
little bit. One is what I call the liquidity trap.
When you have an a state that's going to need
money to do certain things like the tax the estate
taxes do within nine months, and if you don't pay
it within nine months, there are exorbitant penalties and interest
that have to be paid on that tax bills five
(16:28):
percent per month penalty for the first five months for
not paying your estate tax. So if you don't have
the cash to pay the estate tax, and all of
the money is tied up in real property, and the
real property can't be sold until the executor gets authority
from the court, and now you're selling at firesale prices
because you've got to liquidate the estate to get the
(16:50):
cash to pay the estate tax. Now you've got just
a quandarya trap that that executor is in. And then
you throw on top of that the fact that you
have these litigants coming in and challenging everything. And I'm
sure the cousin, you know, I don't know. You don't
know if the cousin is an honest actor or a
(17:11):
bad actor. You just don't know. But if even if
they're an honest actor, and these two girls think that
they're getting short changed somehow, they're going to find a lawyer,
pay the lawyer, and the lawyer's going to come in
and file objections and just walk through a little bit.
How easy is it to object to a will? Really?
Speaker 3 (17:31):
Very easy. You don't even have to be extremely specific
about your objections because the court is it is exceptionally
client to people coming in to object to the probate
of a will. So it's very easy. It's a simple
seventy five dollars fee.
Speaker 4 (17:52):
You file.
Speaker 3 (17:54):
A single page paper that says I object. You lay
out your objections to the extent as you can, but
anything is going to count in court and start tying
up the probate process. So when someone comes.
Speaker 2 (18:08):
Into object and then you're looking at another six months,
I mean the moment that you object, you're looking at
six months.
Speaker 1 (18:15):
And the will is not admitted until those objections are cleared. Sure,
so you're tied up, and it is the process. And
people I sit there and tell them what they have
to do to probate an estate. And first of all,
I said, oh, well, well my mom had a will.
She said, she avoided probate because she had a will.
How many clients come and tell us that I have
a will, I don't have to go to probate. Have
(18:37):
you ever heard that before? Yes, and a will by definition,
the definition of probate is the.
Speaker 3 (18:45):
Proof of the will right exactly, so the.
Speaker 1 (18:50):
Will doesn't have any effects. And I have clients that
have actually taken a will to a bank and said,
here's a death certificate, here's the will. I'm the executor,
I'm beneficiary, I'm the only child. And even a bank
teller that's on first day on the job gets trained
to say, sorry, ma'am, that isn't a way to transfer this.
You have to go get something in The clients never
(19:11):
remember you have to get something called letters testament. And
they come back, I have to get some kind of letters.
Can you give me? Can you give me those letters?
I said, yeah, here's what you have to do. Here
are the steps that you have to take to get
those letters. You have to number one, hopefully you have
something called a self proving affidavit. Otherwise you've got to
locate the witnesses to the will and they have to
(19:32):
do an affidavit of a testing witnesses you have to
locate all of the what we call distributees to the will,
which are the natural heirs. You have to serve notices
on all the legatees, the people taking under the will.
So you've got a ton of paperwork to do. And
here's where the monkey wrench gets thrown in. You have
fourteen cousins, thirteen signed waivers of citation. One doesn't Where
(19:54):
do you go, Brent?
Speaker 2 (19:55):
You got a court I mean said, well, yeah, if
someone does and sign the waiver and consent, they're going
to be issued a citation and then you're you're.
Speaker 1 (20:05):
So you have to now serve them with process.
Speaker 2 (20:07):
Yeah, you get a process server.
Speaker 1 (20:09):
You get a date from the judge a couple months
down the road because the court's busy, calendars clogged.
Speaker 2 (20:14):
Ye, that person gets served.
Speaker 1 (20:15):
They don't know what it.
Speaker 2 (20:17):
They don't know what Half the time, they're running and
hiding under the couch and they're they're not they're not
going to accept service.
Speaker 1 (20:25):
And even if they do on the return date, because
they call it a citation return day. So you go
through all this paperwork, You go through all this work.
You get the affidavits, You get the affidavit of family tree. Sure,
which shows that fourteenth cousin out there on the wing
somewhere that you didn't even know existed. And you have
to find these people, folks. You cannot probate the will
without getting jurisdiction over them, jurisdiction. And so when we
(20:49):
show up on that return date, really, what do they
have to do to file objections? Nothing?
Speaker 3 (20:56):
They can essentially bomb raise that object in court, raise
their hands when when I want to judge calls the
matter and they can say I object, your honor, and.
Speaker 1 (21:06):
They get something called a fourteen oh four hearing by right,
And just to tell our listeners what that is, it's
a number on it's in the statute. Fourteen oh four
is something I've testified at numerous times. So it's a
hearing to examine witnesses to the will. So even if
you have that affidavit where and we do this by design,
(21:29):
we do an automatic affidavit of attesting witnesses simultaneous with
the execution of the will. So we have that document
in our in our file. But when you show up
on a citation return date and that beneficiary says I object,
now they have a right to call all of the
witnesses to the will and any constiles to the will.
Speaker 2 (21:48):
Yeah, and this is where things get messy. I mean,
and now you've got a hearing because you know in laws,
this is like ours. You know, half the time, none
of these people remember the will signing. So you know,
you have these fourteen oh four hearings and you've got
these people and they're like, well.
Speaker 1 (22:07):
I don't remember that day.
Speaker 2 (22:08):
I don't you know, maybe I was there, maybe I wasn't,
And it's just it's messy.
Speaker 1 (22:14):
So choose your witnesses careful, right, because they're going to
get called on and they have to sign an affidavit
at some point to submit the will to probate. This
swears that the person was competent, that they were not
under any undue influence, that there was no fraud involved,
that the will was properly executed, that the witnesses were
in the same room with the person signing the will.
(22:34):
They call it a test stator. All of those things
have to go into the court and then somebody just
stands up and raises their hand and says I object,
and they get a hearing date, and then you have
to produce all the witnesses. I had a woman, we
only have a minute left, but very quickly. I had
a woman who happened to be an attorney, one of
the first female graduates of Albany Law School, that was
(22:57):
a do it yourself for DIY. This is one of
the reasons you don't go out and use legal zome.
She did her own will. She did three condicils to
the will each time she took it to the bank,
and had different bank tellers. There were eight witnesses. We
found the will after a lengthy administrative proceeding where my
client and his cousin were fighting over the executorship. We
(23:18):
found it in her underwear drawer and we had to
bring in all eight witnesses, all eight bank tellers who
are now working at different banks, and we had them
all in the courtroom and we had to depose them
all in a hearing. So, folks, that's probate. When we
say avoid probate, we say it very quickly. We don't
really think about all the underlying issues. But when we
(23:40):
do the second half of the show, you're going to
hear more of this and we're going to talk about
how to fix it, how can you avoid it? Stay
with us. We'll be back right after the News lit
and we're back. Welcome back, folks. We're going to give
that phone number out one more time. If you have
a question, if you have just a story you want
(24:03):
to tell or comment, give us a call. Eight hundred
eight two five, five nine four nine and eight hundred
Talk WGY. I am Lupiro, your host for this morning.
I am live here in studio in the wonderful WGY
Studios in Latham, New York, with Brent Stack, one of
our attorneys who handles a state and trust litigation, guardianship litigation.
(24:23):
And we have on the phone with us all the
way from Manhattan Burley Brown, who is one of our
associates in the New York City office who also handles
the state matters and has extensive experience in a state.
So we have a lot of years behind us in
the studio and on the phone. You have a question,
give us a call. But Brent, I want to turn
to another messy issue because, as I tell clients and
(24:48):
clients don't really think about this because they see themselves
as infallible. I'm never gonna never gonna need a guardian,
never gonna need a power of attorney, never going to
need a healthcare proxy, but you should have the healthcare
proxy and power attorney because you don't want to have
a guardian. And a guardian is something that is appointed
by a court that can have powers over you your
(25:12):
personal health care, your finances, your money, your business. And
there are very publicized, highly publicized guardianship litigations over very
big assets like the La Clippers. There was a guardianship
proceeding over because husband and wife owned it fifty to
fifty and the wife said that the husband was incapacitated.
(25:33):
She wanted to sell it to Jeff Bezos, and she
ended up winning and being able to sell it to
Jeff Bezos. You know, Britney Spears, we've talked about at
length on here. That was a big one, and that
was a big guardianship case. But Brent, you do a
lot of guardianship work. And just give us your background
because you're actually represented the people who were incapacitated, and
(25:54):
just tell us a little bit about that in this
case that we're going to talk about next.
Speaker 2 (25:57):
I did, yeah, before coming to Pierre O'Connor Streuss, I
worked at the Mental hygien Legal Service and I represented
the individuals who are incapacitated or alleged to be incapacitated.
So I have a lot of experience representing those those people.
(26:17):
And yeah, I mean, and you want me to talk
about the most recent case that I.
Speaker 1 (26:24):
Have, sure, Yeah, I mean. We I could go on
and on about guardianship cases because they tend to be
the most colorful, but just much this case right here,
we've been We've done movie scripts as we're doing guardianship
trials because okay, that's the ad actor is going to
play this character and it plays out in court in
a really strange way. But just talk about this case
(26:47):
because it kind of brings together a lot of different things.
It does.
Speaker 2 (26:50):
It does bring together a lot of So this individual
reached out to us because we do we also do
planning medicaid planning. This individual reach out to Frank because.
Speaker 1 (27:02):
Frank being Frank hemming our medicran.
Speaker 2 (27:04):
Hemming our medicaid man, the patriarch of the family went
into a nursing home unexpectedly. The family didn't see this coming.
So because folks, life happens, because like yep, So then
(27:24):
they came to us and and what do we do now?
We need medicaid? We need you know, we have to
pay for this somehow, and Frank said, I don't think
I can help you yet because this person is an adult.
They need guardianship. Well, that's because they didn't have plan,
didn't They didn't plan right, So then the the children
(27:50):
didn't realize that. The children thought that the family had
no money whatsoever. Turns out they had a couple of
million dollars hidden I guess not the mattress, but not
to disclose, right right, So now what do you do?
Speaker 1 (28:10):
And nursing homes today, Just so our listeners know, it's
roughly eighteen thousand dollars per month and that's the nursing
home costs. So even if you have a million dollars,
if you're in the nursing home long enough, it's going
to eat that million dollars right away. Yep.
Speaker 2 (28:27):
And the family members who got involved are not local,
they're from out of state. Turns out the individuals, one
of the ex husbands came in, got moved into the house,
(28:49):
and now all of a sudden, they execute a power
of attorney, a health care proxy, a will, a living will.
They print all this stuff off the internet and now
they are the estate plan legal Zoom, legal.
Speaker 1 (29:03):
Zoom, There you go. Do it yourself, folks in the
legal realm is a very dangerous activity. I you know,
you're using a professional for a reason. And the reason
that I went to a cardiac surgeon ten years ago
to get a quintuple bypass is because I could have
read a book and learned how to do it, but
I certainly didn't want to do it on myself. And
(29:26):
when you have a complex estate plan, or even a
simple estate plan, you want to just make sure that
you get it done right, that it's enforceable. And when
the you know what hits the fan, and it happens,
we have these problems.
Speaker 2 (29:41):
Yeah, and at this point, you know, I can go
to court. I don't know if I'm going to win.
I mean, because once you have these documents in place,
once you have a health care proxy, a power of attorney,
the courts presume that you know, the individual executing these
documents did so intentionally and purposefully. And so I have
(30:02):
an uphill battle saying that these documents are not valid
as a petitioner. And yes, and you know, and I
don't know if I'm you know, I don't know if
I'll be successful.
Speaker 1 (30:12):
Most times, our firm represents the petitioners right, people seeking
guardians right. We've also represented respondents and we've been called
a pond to represent ips AIPS alleged incapacitated persons because
they didn't believe they needed a guardian it. We've vindicated
their rights. But in the case where you've got the
(30:34):
presumption of capacity, which is the law, every individual is
presumed to have capacity, there's something in the law when
you go to court that is critical to a litigator,
and that is called the burden of proof, right, And
I'm up against it. You know, you have to have evidence.
As they tell my clients, it ain't what you know,
(30:55):
it's what you can prove. And there's a big difference.
Speaker 2 (30:59):
Yeah, yeah, no, I'm up against it. I mean it's
it's I would say to any of our clients. All
of my clients try to stay out of court.
Speaker 1 (31:10):
That's the theme because the end tagline on life happens
folks is are you prepared? And that's kind of a
why we point out all the things that have happened
where people are not prepared. And reverally, you've given us
another case here to talk about. We do a lot
(31:31):
of guardianship work. We've done it for years, but another
surviving spouse case. And just to point out, when you
have untraditional families, if you have a family that is
husband and wife married sixty years, two adult children, three grandchildren,
everybody gets along. That's an easy plan. When you have
(31:53):
second marriage, third marriage, fourth marriage, you have children from
other marriages, you have children born out of wedlock, children
worn that you don't even know about yet. The rose
cases have a lot of hair on him, as we say,
And and really you've dealt with a number of those.
And when we get into spousal situations, there's tension. There's
a dynamic tension between the kids of the deceased spouse
(32:17):
and the surviving.
Speaker 3 (32:18):
Spouse, right, very very much so. So which which case
do you want me to talk about now, lou I
have a couple of them that I could I could
throw in here.
Speaker 1 (32:31):
Uh, pick pick your favorite. I'm my favorite.
Speaker 3 (32:35):
I will pick my favorite. This this one was a
real doozy. We had a playwright who married to a
pretty pretty famous actress on the New York theater scene
who died several years before seated in nineteen ninety six.
His will left uh, pretty much all of business state
(32:57):
in a marital trust for her, and when she died,
it was supposed to be divided partially to a charity.
His copyrights and and and plays and royalties were supposed
to go to a charity, and in the balance of
his estate after she dies was supposed to go to
(33:19):
his daughter outright. So wife comes in several years later,
about ten years afterwards, and does her own will. And
not only did she never administer the assets from her
husband's estate in the trust with her attorney co fiduciary,
(33:40):
she then changed the plan and left everything in the estate,
including the copyrights and the plays, to her daughter in
trust and to her longtime assistant who was part of
the family essentially, who was helping them out prior to
(34:02):
the father died. So the copywriters were supposed to go
to her assistant, the rest of the estates and her daughter.
Needless to say, everyone started fighting. The Attorney General was
involved in that site, the charity was involved in that site.
The daughter was fighting because she wanted her money outright
and not in trust. And it was a very very
(34:22):
protracted litigation that actually just recently settled, even though I
wasn't working for the firm that that represented that case anymore.
But I followed it recently settled. But another example of
just a failure to plan. One of the issues was
(34:45):
the attorney who drafted her will didn't do the due
diligence to discuss the prior plan that her husband had
in place, and so it just caused an entire disaster
in court that lasted again for about ten years and
cost the estate almost a million dollars in fees as well,
(35:09):
and obviously disrupted the family dynamics, and it was just
a very very very bad outcome. So the moral of
the story, folks, plan, plan, plan, As Lou said, make
sure that you hire an attorney who understands estate planning,
(35:31):
who can provide the best plan for you, because not
everyone's plan is not a one plant at all. Everyone's
situation is unique, and you need the advice of an
attorney who can properly advise you and prepare you for
your unique situations and the right estate plan for you.
The wrong estate plan is just as bad as no
(35:54):
estate plan.
Speaker 1 (35:56):
Couldn't have said it better myself, So I had people always, Oh,
it's going to be simple, and then they start describing
the situation. I said, what's simple about that? And I say, Okay,
so what could go wrong? Let me tell you the
hundred things that could go wrong, And we have a caller.
We're going to take Dave and Burnt Hills. Good morning, Dave,
thanks for calling into Life Happens.
Speaker 4 (36:17):
Hey, good morning, Lou. I may have a quick little
story that will endorse what you're talking about. I'm in
the middle of it. We did not have my father's
estate in a trust. My brother in law is the executor.
He didn't want to do the trust because he thought
it was too expensive. It was a simple little estate.
Blah blah blah.
Speaker 1 (36:38):
All right, Dave, here's what we say to that. You
can pay me now, you can pay me later.
Speaker 4 (36:44):
So my question, Lou is this, I got a letter
in the mail from my.
Speaker 1 (36:50):
And why don't we do this? Why don't we take
a short break, And while we do, we'll have Dave
hopefully call back in. We'll get his story, and then
we're going to talk about some famus folks, because this
isn't just our clients, and we we like to use
celebrities and celebrity stories because they get it wrong a
lot of times too. So stay with us. We'll be
(37:12):
back to talk about Aretha Franklin and her will situation,
Heath Ledger and Verly, who did you want to talk about?
Speaker 4 (37:22):
Prince Prince Purple rain Baby, And so stay with us.
Speaker 1 (37:30):
We'll be right back after this short break and we
are back. Welcome back to Life Happens. I'm Lou Piro,
live in studio here with Brent Stack. We're talking about
cases that make you pull your hair up. And if
you've seen some of my colleagues, you'll know that they
worked on those cases. So and we have Burly Brown
(37:51):
down in New York City and we're talking about a
whole host of things. And Dave, we were having a
little technical difficulty with the board. So if you want
to call back in, please do and we might have
to put early on hold for a little bit and
then get him back in. But we'd love to hear
your story. And one of my favorites over time was
the Aretha Franklin estate. And she died. She had a
(38:13):
will that she had done in twenty ten, and she
had that will notarized. She had it in a locked cabinet,
nobody knew it was there. She then did subsequent wills,
the most recent of which was a twenty fourteen will
which was handwritten, signed, but not witnessed, not notarized, and
(38:34):
it was stuffed in a couch cushion. And so after
she passed everybody, and I talked about this earlier. When
you don't have a will, you have an administration and
it's like a free for all. Anybody can come in
that has standing, that has enough relationship to you to
petition the court to be your administrator. And they had
(38:54):
conflicting children coming in and petitioning to be administrators. And
then all of a sudden they start to clean out
the house. And I've had this experience and the will,
one will hidden in the couch cushion, one will hidden
in the locked cabinet. There was another will in the bedroom.
And now they have children who are Each will had
a different executor, Each will had different beneficiaries, and they
(39:18):
had all the kids litigating this state and which will
do you think they held valid in the court where
she lived because it wasn't New York. This would not
have been the decision in New York because the state
allowed something called the holographic will, which you just had
to prove the handwriting and that it was her signature.
So the couch cushion will won out and the son
(39:39):
that was appointed in the will, that was stuffed into
the couch cushion became the executor and the beneficiary. So
you don't want to have this. So not only is
it enough to have a document, as Brent said, it's
how the document then gets used. Do you have your
assets lined up in conjunction with the document? Is everything
accounted for that you own? Is there a specific provision
(40:02):
for those assets? And do we have an ability to
do this without having all of this have to run
through the court. And really you are right on target
if you if you have to pay some money to
do a trust, that's not an expense, folks, that's an
investment because what the results are if you don't do
(40:25):
that planning are all the things we're talking about here today.
And you know, we go through the celebrities and Heath
Ledger another one, you know, the best joker ever? Yeah,
defined a joker?
Speaker 2 (40:38):
Yeah, I think, yeah, I think that's a really good
cautionary tale. Heath Ledger, you know, very rose to fame
very quickly. I think he executed a will. You know,
at the rise of his fame, he named his siblings
(41:00):
and his parents as his beneficiaries than when he was
the joker, he fell in love had a child. That
child never got included into his estate plan. So when
he passed prematurely and they went to probate his his will,
(41:23):
his child was not accounted for at all. Luckily in
his in that case, the parents, the beneficiaries of the
estates said no, this isn't right. He failed to plan,
but we're going to take care of of Matilda, his daughter.
(41:43):
But that doesn't always happen. I mean that that that's
the you know that that's a success story of failing
to plan because the people and the other beneficiaries took
care of of They did what should have happened. But
this is a guy who you know, he had twenty
million dollars, twenty million dollars, never didn't plan for his child.
Speaker 1 (42:06):
So this brings up several points. One is, can you
rely on people to do the right thing? No, And
the answer is, once you're gone, life changes. Their attitudes change,
their perceptions change, and suddenly perceptions become realities that are
(42:29):
not realities, and they have different influences. And sometimes it's
a spouse that's influencing one of the children and saying no,
you have to challenge this, so you don't always know
if it's the person that you're counting on to do
the right thing, whether they've changed or they're being influenced,
whatever the reason. You cannot count on people to do
(42:51):
the right thing. Write the script, put it in writing,
put it into trust, have it be fully enforceable, have
transparent and see. And the other point here, gentlemen, is
you have to update your plan.
Speaker 2 (43:05):
Absolutely, yeah. And you can't just do it one It's
not a one off. You've got to stay with it.
You've you've got to update your plan. You've got to
you know, stay current.
Speaker 1 (43:17):
Yeah. How many times do we have clients that life happens,
never change beneficiaries on life insurance policies and iras, and
you know, they get married and they got their mother
on as the beneficiary of their IRA, and the wife said,
what happens all the time. And so when when you're
(43:37):
doing this planning and we sit with clients and I
do lengthy consultations, probably the longest in the office, just
because of my experience in knowing that I have to
dig deep to get to the heart of the matter.
You have to dig and you have to ask questions
(43:58):
and people look at me and say, I never thought
of any of those things, because I've asked twenty two
what if questions, what if this happens, what if that happens?
And I do it because I've seen it happen where
you've named I'm trustee on a trust where I was
the fourth in line. I did the trust for my clients,
you know, twenty years ago, and all their family was
(44:19):
dead and it fell to me to be the trustee
of the trust. And they hadn't I hadn't talked to
them in twenty years, and all of a sudden you
get a call from another lawyer saying, oh, yeah, you're
the trustee of this trust. I said, oh okay. So
when you're in a situation where you're saying, okay, I'm
going to rely on all of these people to take
care of it. And Brett, you've worked in the MHLS
(44:41):
Mental Hygiene Legal Services, so you know that families that
have children with disabilities need to plan very carefully. Absolutely,
and we do something called a special needs trust. And
if I had a nickel for every family that came
in and said, well, I have two kids, one's doing
great and he's going to take care of his other
So I'm going to leave one hundred percent to the
(45:02):
child who who is doing well, and he's going to
take care of his brother who has the special needs.
Oh my goodness, have you just set your child with
the disability up for what could be a terrible life
because you don't know if that child you're leaving everything
is going to be alive, if they're going to be competent,
if they're going to do the right things with that money.
(45:23):
You've created all kinds of tax issues. So, Brent, what's
the solution?
Speaker 2 (45:27):
Well, yeah, I mean a special needs trust. I guess
the first and foremost is what you're doing is protecting
your eligibility for public benefits, for public assistance.
Speaker 1 (45:41):
You can take.
Speaker 2 (45:43):
A sum of money, set it aside, put it in
a supplemental needs trust, use it for trips for you know,
expenditures that are not going to Jepper eyes. Your eligibility
for public services. These individuals get social Social Security, they
(46:08):
get SSI s SI s S and Medicaid. Medicaid.
Speaker 1 (46:12):
Yeah, and most of them rely on medicaid for their existence.
Speaker 2 (46:15):
They rely on it, yep. But you can set aside
to some of money. It's not going to impact your
public assistance. You can use that money for to benefit
your life in many ways.
Speaker 1 (46:27):
So when when you're doing the planning, and these are
the wife of questions, you know who are going to
going to be your beneficiaries? Is it children? Is it grandchildren?
How do we set it up so that your children
can be protected? And I usually when I do seminars,
I line it up a spectrum of trust beneficiaries. You
have the child who is a genius who manages all
(46:48):
his own money and and takes care of everything for
the whole family, that that person is going to be
in charge of a lot of things, including his or
her own trust. On the other end of the spectrum,
you have have a child who has been disabled since birth,
who cannot function in any meaningful capacity other than with
total assistance, and that child needs full help. And in
(47:10):
between you have child with gambling problems, drinking problems, spend
thrift problems. They just can't stop spending money. So you
design your trust specifically to contemplate all of those situations.
And that's why my consultation takes it inn long, because
I'm digging into every beneficiary, every possible permutation of that plan,
looking at every asset, how do we weave the assets together?
(47:32):
You mentioned copyrights early. People have unique assets that need
to be factored in. And we have about four more minutes,
three more minutes. Let's go back furly to the case
with the surviving spouse, because this issue plays itself out
so frequently. Yeah, and fighting with the children, fighting with
(47:56):
the parents. In this case, it was the parents. So
just talk briefly about that case.
Speaker 3 (48:03):
Yeah, So that's that was another set of sad circumstances.
Wife had metastatic breast cancer. She moved to New York City,
uh to to be closer to her treatment at Memorial
Stone Cattering. Her husband didn't immediately move with her because
(48:25):
of work commitments, but she had no plan until she
was literally on her death Bend made a will that
left everything to him, left him in charge of the children,
and and and and trust for the children. So we
think that's a good plan, right, No, still fighting her.
(48:49):
Her parents apparently didn't like him very much, and as
soon as she died, they started litigating one to throw
out the will, saying that she did not have totamentric
capacity because the will was drafted and executed was while
she was sick and undergoing chemo. And then they also
were trying to disinherit and inherit him even in intestacy,
(49:14):
saying that he abandoned the wife and so he was
not entitled to his share as a surviving spouse, which
for those of you who don't know, that's that's the thing.
You can essentially be disinherited as a surviving spouse if
the party bringing that matterick and proved that you abandoned
(49:35):
your spouse.
Speaker 1 (49:37):
Really winding down on time, and the theme there is
don't wait until you're death wait to do your will,
because it's you're just opening it up for challenge. And
those parents had a really good lawyer that raised every
issue that you could possibly raise. And even if they
don't win outright, they're going to get a settlement because
they're going to drag this thing out until exactly too late.
(50:01):
So Brent Stack Verly Brown, thanks for being with us today.
We are out see you next week
And we're going to talk about some things today that
I think will be of interest to you because we're
going to talk about some cases that are firm handles,
that are just cases you don't want to be in.
And we're going to talk about some celebrities that you
may recognize and the things that they've done are not done.
But the theme today is how to punish your family
(00:21):
when you die? So it's kind of an ominous theme, right,
why would I ever punish my family when I die?
But here's the main reason I hear why families end
up in crisis, and that is, well, I'm not going
to do anything, let them worry about it. And how
many people just don't do a plan, basic simple things.
(00:42):
Do a will? We like trusts? How do you keep
your family safe? How do you make sure that you
are safe if you become incapacitated. How do you know
that your assets are going to be managed properly, You're
going to get the care that you need, and you're
going to have your life play out in a way
that is favorable to you that you can direct the show,
(01:04):
And we talk about writing your own script. Well, a
lot of the cases we're going to talk about today
are unscripted. They end up in court and now you
have a judge who's going to write an order, and
that order becomes your script. Trust me, folks, you don't
want to be there. So I'm very happy today to
have Liven studio with me. One of our associates who
(01:25):
handles all of these messes, Brent Stak, Good morning, Brent,
Good morning, Lou.
Speaker 2 (01:29):
How are you.
Speaker 1 (01:29):
I'm doing fine today. I'm all pumped up. I think
this is a great show. It's a great topic. We've
done this topic before. One of our other associate attorneys
who does a state administration with us, Adriana Mahalik, was
here and she and I went through a bunch of
cases and a bunch of things that we've worked on.
And I know you have cases that you've worked on.
And we're working on getting our other associate who's going
(01:52):
to join us from our New York City office, and
we may have him on now. Thumbs up from the
engineer Burly Brown, Good morning from Hey. We're good here.
We're here in the warm studio, no chilli outside, little
windy outside. I had a big tree, like a thirty
(02:12):
foot tree fall on my property last night and I
woke up at two in the morning going boom, and
I looked out and there's the tree. It was really yeah,
So now I got to call somebody come and cut
it up and all that fun stuff. But that's you know,
life in the Great Northeast. You get cold wind and
knocks down trees. Today. Really and really, I'm going to
(02:33):
introduce you to our audience because I don't believe you've
been on the show yet.
Speaker 3 (02:37):
No, I am not first time.
Speaker 1 (02:40):
Brent's been here at least once or twice a few times,
a few times. We're Aaron Connor, my partner, and Verly,
just tell our listeners a little bit about yourself. You
work out of the Manhattan office, You're a marathon or
just ran the Chicago Marathon. New grandfather, new grandfather, You
look too young to be a grandfather, but your experience,
(03:01):
I think will lend great credibility and wait to today's show
in the courts and your experience as an attorney. So
just give our audience a little bit about what Burly
Brown is all about.
Speaker 3 (03:11):
Sure so yes. In addition to all of the marathon
and new grand baby events that have been happening in
my life, I've been practicing in the trust in the
States area for about sixteen or so years, and you know,
primarily focused on a state administration and a state litigation.
(03:34):
So I've I've seen quite a lot in this practice area,
a lot of interesting matters and a lot of examples
that we can definitely share it today on this LUs
radio show. So talk a little bit about my professional background.
To sort of keep track on the marathon thing. I
(03:57):
don't know if I told you guys did, but I'm
to be running the Tokyo Marathon in March. So that's
the next the next thing on my marathon my marathon highlights.
Speaker 1 (04:08):
I had not heard that, but congratulations is that one
that you have to qualify for? And I guess your
time in Chicago got you there.
Speaker 3 (04:16):
No, that's so. I basically I like to run for
charitable organizations to promote a good cost. So the charity
that I ran for in Chicago, I'm running for them
again in Tokyo because I like the organization and the
and the work that they do.
Speaker 4 (04:35):
Cool.
Speaker 1 (04:36):
And you've been in the court system before as well,
and we're going to talk a lot about the court
system today and what that means for families when they
get caught in that court system in proceedings that are
not smooth at times. So what was your experience really
in the courts dealing with the states and trusts.
Speaker 3 (04:55):
Well, you're you're exactly right, Lou. When proceedings come in
that are not sloth, it can be extremely difficult to
get through the court process, especially when you have complicated
family dynamics and everyone isn't in agreement with the with
the proceeding that is being brought in court. So my
(05:18):
motto is, if you can avoid probates, avoid probates. And
I guess that's will be part of the discussion today
about you know, the probate process, the difficulties of that,
and why it makes sense to either have a really
good estate plan or better yet, just avoid the probate
court altogether.
Speaker 1 (05:39):
Yeah. And I know in certain courts there are even
on a good day, even with a perfectly clean estate,
as we say, where you know all the beneficiaries, everybody's signs, waivers,
you're going for just a standard letters testamentary, the wait
times in certain courts can be terribly.
Speaker 3 (05:57):
Frustrated, exactly exactly right, And you know it's it's it's
interesting because you would think that is a very straightforward
probate matter would just float through and and and and
get to the end very quickly. But the problem is
in most courts when they have a backflog, whether it's
(06:19):
a complicated case or a straightforward case, everything's falled in
the pile and you essentially wait your turn, So your
matter can be sitting on the clerk's desk in the
pile for several weeks before anyone even looks at it,
even if it's a very straightforward and simple probate proceeding.
Speaker 2 (06:40):
So ill that I call that pile a black hole?
Speaker 3 (06:46):
Yes, exactly, the Berma triangle.
Speaker 1 (06:49):
Yes, yes, So I have a case that I'm involved in.
I'm not the attorney for the estate, but I was
asked to be a co executor. And this is a
an estate that has a property in Manhattan, and Verly
is familiar with this case. He's actually scoped out the
property because we want to sell. We want to sell
the property. In order to sell the property, it was
(07:10):
in the decedent's name alone. If it wasn't a trust,
the property would have been sold two years ago. But
it's it's in the decedent's name, so it's in an
a state, and the estate had an attorney that was
representing a gentleman who is an Italian citizen, has no
US contacts, but is the beneficiary of the estate, and
became the co executor. He could not be the sole executor.
And the attorney petitioned for probate and got letters testamentary,
(07:33):
and they were proceeding on and the attorney that asked
me to step in did so because the attorney that
was probating the estate died. So life happens and so
does death, and so that attorney is out of the picture.
And the attorney that was petitioning the court then filed
a supplemental petition simply to have me substituted in for
(07:56):
the deceased attorney. That request has been sitting on the
judge's desk for nine months, not nine weeks. Nine months.
In the meantime, this building sits vacant. The executor in
Italy saying, I hate America. You know this is I'm
tied up in the court. I have no idea why,
(08:16):
and it's you know, it's a several million dollar building
that he's going to get the proceeds from. So in
court that's kind of what we're facing, and it doesn't
have to be a lot of money. In fact, the
cases that often present the thorniest problems are the cases
with very little money, perhaps just a house. And I'll
tell one of my other war stories and then we're
(08:37):
going to open up the phone line. So stay tuned, folks.
But I had a client. It's a long story. It
would take me several days to unwind this whole story.
It went through several court proceedings, permutations, but at the
end of the day, the gentleman was really alone. Had
his parents had passed away, his brother had passed away,
It was just him. He's living in his own home.
(08:58):
He was on Medicaid and so he was living with
some home health aids at home. And he wanted to
sell the house and move into assisted living. And so
he had a friend, a neighbor who had taken a
power of attorney and was doing the sale of the
house for him. They had a contract for sale and
(09:19):
they were ready to go to closing and he died. Well, gentlemen,
what dies with you in that scenario that I just described,
I mean all of it, your power of attorney? Yeah, exactly,
So who is the executor of the estate named in
the will that some dummy drafted me so executive. So
(09:43):
I had to go and I had to probate the
will to get authority to sell the house. And I
had a contract sitting on my desk. This buyer was
ready and hot to buy the house. Interest rates were low.
Everything was good, except he had no parents, he had
no spouse, he had no siblings. I had to find
(10:05):
his heirs in order to get probate, because folks, you
have to serve every distributee everybody who is a natural heir,
and in this case, it was cousins and relatives. He
didn't know. I didn't know, so we basically had to
do a whole genealogical search because I couldn't get the
will probated and I couldn't get in to get authority,
(10:27):
and I applied for temporary letters and that just sat too.
But I was stuck. So what happens. Interest rates pop,
they go way up, the buyer backs out, we lose
the contract. There would have been some equity in the
house under that initial contract, because there was a mortgage
on it. There would have been equity by the time
(10:48):
I got to sell the house. A year later, the
equity was gone because the market had tanked. And so
here we are trying to sell the house. Medicaid wants
their share. The woman who had been taking care of
him and it had been selling the house and was
a real estate broker, wanted her share. I'm trying to say, Okay,
we need to get some kind of attorney sees out
of this. I'm working my tail off trying to find
(11:09):
all of these damn heirs and there's just no money.
And that's what you end up with in probate. You
don't have control. Yeah, you don't have control. So we're
going to take a quick break. When we come back Verly,
I want to start with one of your cases and
then give us a call. Folks, if you have questions
on a state administration. You got three lawyers that are
battling it out in courts. We do guardianship, and Brent's
(11:33):
going to talk about some of the guardianship litigation that
we do. We do a state and trust litigation. Today
is how to punish your family when you die, and
we're going to show you all the ways that people
have done it, but more importantly, how you can avoid it.
So stay with us we'll be back after this short
break and we are back. Welcome back to life happens.
(11:54):
I'm Lupiro all fired up today. Too much caffeine. No,
this is natural to you. I didn't have that fourth
cup of coffee today. So these topics and I start
as we were preparing for the show, I just the
memory banks just started to roll in all these cases,
these past cases where people just got destroyed in court
(12:16):
and the family is after two three years of proceedings
and litigation. That just blows the family up. And you
don't want to have your family in that situation. So
I'm going to open up the phone lines. We'll take
your calls eight hundred eight two, five fifty nine forty nine.
And if you've called the show before, it's eight hundred
talk WGY. But I'm gonna give it to you one
(12:38):
more time in numbers eight hundred eight two five, five
nine four nine. Give us a call. We're here, three
lawyers ready to serve you. I don't think we can
charge for these coms now, so it's for free. You know,
you get free legal advice on the radio. No, it's
not legal advice that we do. That disclaimer before and
after the show. We cannot give you legal advice on
(12:59):
the radio, so we'll answer questions as best we can. So, really,
you have a case which is a protracted estate litigation.
This one did have money, had like thirty million dollars,
So just tell us a little bit about it and
where that went and why it went sideways.
Speaker 3 (13:15):
So, yeah, this is this is actually a pretty tragic story.
A husband and wife had two young daughters. White was
found dead by the pool one morning. Her husband was
probating her estates didn't do much of it because he
got sick during the process and then he died. So
(13:40):
they did have wills, but their wills were poorly drafted.
No one made any real provisions for the children. The
distribution of a state assets was was extremely complicated because
most of them that estimated thirty million dollars estate asset
was the compound that they lived on, and it was
(14:04):
just a very difficult estate to administer because it was
real estate rich but cash for Then the daughters turned
around and ensued the the the estate fiduciary who was
a cousin of their mother, and that litigation was protracted
(14:27):
and nasty for at least ten years. It recently settled,
and and and and that's litigation that could have been
avoided with the appropriate planning. It This was this was
the perfect estate that should have been set up in
a trust or trust for the wife and a husband,
(14:47):
with further trust for the for the daughters, where these
decisions would have been in place instead before having to
go to court to try to figure out how to
navigate the litigation that these these young girls brought to
the estate. And a lot of that was was just
the you know, the the trauma of having lost their
(15:07):
parents back to back. But again another example of having
your your your personal life litigated in the court. And
this is one of those cases that was so litigious
and and and so interesting that it actually made the news.
(15:28):
It was in two newspapers, one pretty well known newspaper
and one local newspaper in there in their community. So
the moral of that story and and and I always
tell clients this is plan, plan, plan, avoid probate as
much as you can, and if you have complicated family dynamics,
(15:51):
make that part of your estate plan as well, because
this particular case was just one of those that it
really was actually because of the extreme lack of planning
with individuals who have significant network, and so.
Speaker 1 (16:07):
That case raises several issues, So let's unpack that a
little bit. One is what I call the liquidity trap.
When you have an a state that's going to need
money to do certain things like the tax the estate
taxes do within nine months, and if you don't pay
it within nine months, there are exorbitant penalties and interest
that have to be paid on that tax bills five
(16:28):
percent per month penalty for the first five months for
not paying your estate tax. So if you don't have
the cash to pay the estate tax, and all of
the money is tied up in real property, and the
real property can't be sold until the executor gets authority
from the court, and now you're selling at firesale prices
because you've got to liquidate the estate to get the
(16:50):
cash to pay the estate tax. Now you've got just
a quandarya trap that that executor is in. And then
you throw on top of that the fact that you
have these litigants coming in and challenging everything. And I'm
sure the cousin, you know, I don't know. You don't
know if the cousin is an honest actor or a
(17:11):
bad actor. You just don't know. But if even if
they're an honest actor, and these two girls think that
they're getting short changed somehow, they're going to find a lawyer,
pay the lawyer, and the lawyer's going to come in
and file objections and just walk through a little bit.
How easy is it to object to a will? Really?
Speaker 3 (17:31):
Very easy. You don't even have to be extremely specific
about your objections because the court is it is exceptionally
client to people coming in to object to the probate
of a will. So it's very easy. It's a simple
seventy five dollars fee.
Speaker 4 (17:52):
You file.
Speaker 3 (17:54):
A single page paper that says I object. You lay
out your objections to the extent as you can, but
anything is going to count in court and start tying
up the probate process. So when someone comes.
Speaker 2 (18:08):
Into object and then you're looking at another six months,
I mean the moment that you object, you're looking at
six months.
Speaker 1 (18:15):
And the will is not admitted until those objections are cleared. Sure,
so you're tied up, and it is the process. And
people I sit there and tell them what they have
to do to probate an estate. And first of all,
I said, oh, well, well my mom had a will.
She said, she avoided probate because she had a will.
How many clients come and tell us that I have
a will, I don't have to go to probate. Have
(18:37):
you ever heard that before? Yes, and a will by definition,
the definition of probate is the.
Speaker 3 (18:45):
Proof of the will right exactly, so the.
Speaker 1 (18:50):
Will doesn't have any effects. And I have clients that
have actually taken a will to a bank and said,
here's a death certificate, here's the will. I'm the executor,
I'm beneficiary, I'm the only child. And even a bank
teller that's on first day on the job gets trained
to say, sorry, ma'am, that isn't a way to transfer this.
You have to go get something in The clients never
(19:11):
remember you have to get something called letters testament. And
they come back, I have to get some kind of letters.
Can you give me? Can you give me those letters?
I said, yeah, here's what you have to do. Here
are the steps that you have to take to get
those letters. You have to number one, hopefully you have
something called a self proving affidavit. Otherwise you've got to
locate the witnesses to the will and they have to
(19:32):
do an affidavit of a testing witnesses you have to
locate all of the what we call distributees to the will,
which are the natural heirs. You have to serve notices
on all the legatees, the people taking under the will.
So you've got a ton of paperwork to do. And
here's where the monkey wrench gets thrown in. You have
fourteen cousins, thirteen signed waivers of citation. One doesn't Where
(19:54):
do you go, Brent?
Speaker 2 (19:55):
You got a court I mean said, well, yeah, if
someone does and sign the waiver and consent, they're going
to be issued a citation and then you're you're.
Speaker 1 (20:05):
So you have to now serve them with process.
Speaker 2 (20:07):
Yeah, you get a process server.
Speaker 1 (20:09):
You get a date from the judge a couple months
down the road because the court's busy, calendars clogged.
Speaker 2 (20:14):
Ye, that person gets served.
Speaker 1 (20:15):
They don't know what it.
Speaker 2 (20:17):
They don't know what Half the time, they're running and
hiding under the couch and they're they're not they're not
going to accept service.
Speaker 1 (20:25):
And even if they do on the return date, because
they call it a citation return day. So you go
through all this paperwork, You go through all this work.
You get the affidavits, You get the affidavit of family tree. Sure,
which shows that fourteenth cousin out there on the wing
somewhere that you didn't even know existed. And you have
to find these people, folks. You cannot probate the will
without getting jurisdiction over them, jurisdiction. And so when we
(20:49):
show up on that return date, really, what do they
have to do to file objections? Nothing?
Speaker 3 (20:56):
They can essentially bomb raise that object in court, raise
their hands when when I want to judge calls the
matter and they can say I object, your honor, and.
Speaker 1 (21:06):
They get something called a fourteen oh four hearing by right,
And just to tell our listeners what that is, it's
a number on it's in the statute. Fourteen oh four
is something I've testified at numerous times. So it's a
hearing to examine witnesses to the will. So even if
you have that affidavit where and we do this by design,
(21:29):
we do an automatic affidavit of attesting witnesses simultaneous with
the execution of the will. So we have that document
in our in our file. But when you show up
on a citation return date and that beneficiary says I object,
now they have a right to call all of the
witnesses to the will and any constiles to the will.
Speaker 2 (21:48):
Yeah, and this is where things get messy. I mean,
and now you've got a hearing because you know in laws,
this is like ours. You know, half the time, none
of these people remember the will signing. So you know,
you have these fourteen oh four hearings and you've got
these people and they're like, well.
Speaker 1 (22:07):
I don't remember that day.
Speaker 2 (22:08):
I don't you know, maybe I was there, maybe I wasn't,
And it's just it's messy.
Speaker 1 (22:14):
So choose your witnesses careful, right, because they're going to
get called on and they have to sign an affidavit
at some point to submit the will to probate. This
swears that the person was competent, that they were not
under any undue influence, that there was no fraud involved,
that the will was properly executed, that the witnesses were
in the same room with the person signing the will.
(22:34):
They call it a test stator. All of those things
have to go into the court and then somebody just
stands up and raises their hand and says I object,
and they get a hearing date, and then you have
to produce all the witnesses. I had a woman, we
only have a minute left, but very quickly. I had
a woman who happened to be an attorney, one of
the first female graduates of Albany Law School, that was
(22:57):
a do it yourself for DIY. This is one of
the reasons you don't go out and use legal zome.
She did her own will. She did three condicils to
the will each time she took it to the bank,
and had different bank tellers. There were eight witnesses. We
found the will after a lengthy administrative proceeding where my
client and his cousin were fighting over the executorship. We
(23:18):
found it in her underwear drawer and we had to
bring in all eight witnesses, all eight bank tellers who
are now working at different banks, and we had them
all in the courtroom and we had to depose them
all in a hearing. So, folks, that's probate. When we
say avoid probate, we say it very quickly. We don't
really think about all the underlying issues. But when we
(23:40):
do the second half of the show, you're going to
hear more of this and we're going to talk about
how to fix it, how can you avoid it? Stay
with us. We'll be back right after the News lit
and we're back. Welcome back, folks. We're going to give
that phone number out one more time. If you have
a question, if you have just a story you want
(24:03):
to tell or comment, give us a call. Eight hundred
eight two five, five nine four nine and eight hundred
Talk WGY. I am Lupiro, your host for this morning.
I am live here in studio in the wonderful WGY
Studios in Latham, New York, with Brent Stack, one of
our attorneys who handles a state and trust litigation, guardianship litigation.
(24:23):
And we have on the phone with us all the
way from Manhattan Burley Brown, who is one of our
associates in the New York City office who also handles
the state matters and has extensive experience in a state.
So we have a lot of years behind us in
the studio and on the phone. You have a question,
give us a call. But Brent, I want to turn
to another messy issue because, as I tell clients and
(24:48):
clients don't really think about this because they see themselves
as infallible. I'm never gonna never gonna need a guardian,
never gonna need a power of attorney, never going to
need a healthcare proxy, but you should have the healthcare
proxy and power attorney because you don't want to have
a guardian. And a guardian is something that is appointed
by a court that can have powers over you your
(25:12):
personal health care, your finances, your money, your business. And
there are very publicized, highly publicized guardianship litigations over very
big assets like the La Clippers. There was a guardianship
proceeding over because husband and wife owned it fifty to
fifty and the wife said that the husband was incapacitated.
(25:33):
She wanted to sell it to Jeff Bezos, and she
ended up winning and being able to sell it to
Jeff Bezos. You know, Britney Spears, we've talked about at
length on here. That was a big one, and that
was a big guardianship case. But Brent, you do a
lot of guardianship work. And just give us your background
because you're actually represented the people who were incapacitated, and
(25:54):
just tell us a little bit about that in this
case that we're going to talk about next.
Speaker 2 (25:57):
I did, yeah, before coming to Pierre O'Connor Streuss, I
worked at the Mental hygien Legal Service and I represented
the individuals who are incapacitated or alleged to be incapacitated.
So I have a lot of experience representing those those people.
(26:17):
And yeah, I mean, and you want me to talk
about the most recent case that I.
Speaker 1 (26:24):
Have, sure, Yeah, I mean. We I could go on
and on about guardianship cases because they tend to be
the most colorful, but just much this case right here,
we've been We've done movie scripts as we're doing guardianship
trials because okay, that's the ad actor is going to
play this character and it plays out in court in
a really strange way. But just talk about this case
(26:47):
because it kind of brings together a lot of different things.
It does.
Speaker 2 (26:50):
It does bring together a lot of So this individual
reached out to us because we do we also do
planning medicaid planning. This individual reach out to Frank because.
Speaker 1 (27:02):
Frank being Frank hemming our medicran.
Speaker 2 (27:04):
Hemming our medicaid man, the patriarch of the family went
into a nursing home unexpectedly. The family didn't see this coming.
So because folks, life happens, because like yep, So then
(27:24):
they came to us and and what do we do now?
We need medicaid? We need you know, we have to
pay for this somehow, and Frank said, I don't think
I can help you yet because this person is an adult.
They need guardianship. Well, that's because they didn't have plan,
didn't They didn't plan right, So then the the children
(27:50):
didn't realize that. The children thought that the family had
no money whatsoever. Turns out they had a couple of
million dollars hidden I guess not the mattress, but not
to disclose, right right, So now what do you do?
Speaker 1 (28:10):
And nursing homes today, Just so our listeners know, it's
roughly eighteen thousand dollars per month and that's the nursing
home costs. So even if you have a million dollars,
if you're in the nursing home long enough, it's going
to eat that million dollars right away. Yep.
Speaker 2 (28:27):
And the family members who got involved are not local,
they're from out of state. Turns out the individuals, one
of the ex husbands came in, got moved into the house,
(28:49):
and now all of a sudden, they execute a power
of attorney, a health care proxy, a will, a living will.
They print all this stuff off the internet and now
they are the estate plan legal Zoom, legal.
Speaker 1 (29:03):
Zoom, There you go. Do it yourself, folks in the
legal realm is a very dangerous activity. I you know,
you're using a professional for a reason. And the reason
that I went to a cardiac surgeon ten years ago
to get a quintuple bypass is because I could have
read a book and learned how to do it, but
I certainly didn't want to do it on myself. And
(29:26):
when you have a complex estate plan, or even a
simple estate plan, you want to just make sure that
you get it done right, that it's enforceable. And when
the you know what hits the fan, and it happens,
we have these problems.
Speaker 2 (29:41):
Yeah, and at this point, you know, I can go
to court. I don't know if I'm going to win.
I mean, because once you have these documents in place,
once you have a health care proxy, a power of attorney,
the courts presume that you know, the individual executing these
documents did so intentionally and purposefully. And so I have
(30:02):
an uphill battle saying that these documents are not valid
as a petitioner. And yes, and you know, and I
don't know if I'm you know, I don't know if
I'll be successful.
Speaker 1 (30:12):
Most times, our firm represents the petitioners right, people seeking
guardians right. We've also represented respondents and we've been called
a pond to represent ips AIPS alleged incapacitated persons because
they didn't believe they needed a guardian it. We've vindicated
their rights. But in the case where you've got the
(30:34):
presumption of capacity, which is the law, every individual is
presumed to have capacity, there's something in the law when
you go to court that is critical to a litigator,
and that is called the burden of proof, right, And
I'm up against it. You know, you have to have evidence.
As they tell my clients, it ain't what you know,
(30:55):
it's what you can prove. And there's a big difference.
Speaker 2 (30:59):
Yeah, yeah, no, I'm up against it. I mean it's
it's I would say to any of our clients. All
of my clients try to stay out of court.
Speaker 1 (31:10):
That's the theme because the end tagline on life happens
folks is are you prepared? And that's kind of a
why we point out all the things that have happened
where people are not prepared. And reverally, you've given us
another case here to talk about. We do a lot
(31:31):
of guardianship work. We've done it for years, but another
surviving spouse case. And just to point out, when you
have untraditional families, if you have a family that is
husband and wife married sixty years, two adult children, three grandchildren,
everybody gets along. That's an easy plan. When you have
(31:53):
second marriage, third marriage, fourth marriage, you have children from
other marriages, you have children born out of wedlock, children
worn that you don't even know about yet. The rose
cases have a lot of hair on him, as we say,
And and really you've dealt with a number of those.
And when we get into spousal situations, there's tension. There's
a dynamic tension between the kids of the deceased spouse
(32:17):
and the surviving.
Speaker 3 (32:18):
Spouse, right, very very much so. So which which case
do you want me to talk about now, lou I
have a couple of them that I could I could
throw in here.
Speaker 1 (32:31):
Uh, pick pick your favorite. I'm my favorite.
Speaker 3 (32:35):
I will pick my favorite. This this one was a
real doozy. We had a playwright who married to a
pretty pretty famous actress on the New York theater scene
who died several years before seated in nineteen ninety six.
His will left uh, pretty much all of business state
(32:57):
in a marital trust for her, and when she died,
it was supposed to be divided partially to a charity.
His copyrights and and and plays and royalties were supposed
to go to a charity, and in the balance of
his estate after she dies was supposed to go to
(33:19):
his daughter outright. So wife comes in several years later,
about ten years afterwards, and does her own will. And
not only did she never administer the assets from her
husband's estate in the trust with her attorney co fiduciary,
(33:40):
she then changed the plan and left everything in the estate,
including the copyrights and the plays, to her daughter in
trust and to her longtime assistant who was part of
the family essentially, who was helping them out prior to
(34:02):
the father died. So the copywriters were supposed to go
to her assistant, the rest of the estates and her daughter.
Needless to say, everyone started fighting. The Attorney General was
involved in that site, the charity was involved in that site.
The daughter was fighting because she wanted her money outright
and not in trust. And it was a very very
(34:22):
protracted litigation that actually just recently settled, even though I
wasn't working for the firm that that represented that case anymore.
But I followed it recently settled. But another example of
just a failure to plan. One of the issues was
(34:45):
the attorney who drafted her will didn't do the due
diligence to discuss the prior plan that her husband had
in place, and so it just caused an entire disaster
in court that lasted again for about ten years and
cost the estate almost a million dollars in fees as well,
(35:09):
and obviously disrupted the family dynamics, and it was just
a very very very bad outcome. So the moral of
the story, folks, plan, plan, plan, As Lou said, make
sure that you hire an attorney who understands estate planning,
(35:31):
who can provide the best plan for you, because not
everyone's plan is not a one plant at all. Everyone's
situation is unique, and you need the advice of an
attorney who can properly advise you and prepare you for
your unique situations and the right estate plan for you.
The wrong estate plan is just as bad as no
(35:54):
estate plan.
Speaker 1 (35:56):
Couldn't have said it better myself, So I had people always, Oh,
it's going to be simple, and then they start describing
the situation. I said, what's simple about that? And I say, Okay,
so what could go wrong? Let me tell you the
hundred things that could go wrong, And we have a caller.
We're going to take Dave and Burnt Hills. Good morning, Dave,
thanks for calling into Life Happens.
Speaker 4 (36:17):
Hey, good morning, Lou. I may have a quick little
story that will endorse what you're talking about. I'm in
the middle of it. We did not have my father's
estate in a trust. My brother in law is the executor.
He didn't want to do the trust because he thought
it was too expensive. It was a simple little estate.
Blah blah blah.
Speaker 1 (36:38):
All right, Dave, here's what we say to that. You
can pay me now, you can pay me later.
Speaker 4 (36:44):
So my question, Lou is this, I got a letter
in the mail from my.
Speaker 1 (36:50):
And why don't we do this? Why don't we take
a short break, And while we do, we'll have Dave
hopefully call back in. We'll get his story, and then
we're going to talk about some famus folks, because this
isn't just our clients, and we we like to use
celebrities and celebrity stories because they get it wrong a
lot of times too. So stay with us. We'll be
(37:12):
back to talk about Aretha Franklin and her will situation,
Heath Ledger and Verly, who did you want to talk about?
Speaker 4 (37:22):
Prince Prince Purple rain Baby, And so stay with us.
Speaker 1 (37:30):
We'll be right back after this short break and we
are back. Welcome back to Life Happens. I'm Lou Piro,
live in studio here with Brent Stack. We're talking about
cases that make you pull your hair up. And if
you've seen some of my colleagues, you'll know that they
worked on those cases. So and we have Burly Brown
(37:51):
down in New York City and we're talking about a
whole host of things. And Dave, we were having a
little technical difficulty with the board. So if you want
to call back in, please do and we might have
to put early on hold for a little bit and
then get him back in. But we'd love to hear
your story. And one of my favorites over time was
the Aretha Franklin estate. And she died. She had a
(38:13):
will that she had done in twenty ten, and she
had that will notarized. She had it in a locked cabinet,
nobody knew it was there. She then did subsequent wills,
the most recent of which was a twenty fourteen will
which was handwritten, signed, but not witnessed, not notarized, and
(38:34):
it was stuffed in a couch cushion. And so after
she passed everybody, and I talked about this earlier. When
you don't have a will, you have an administration and
it's like a free for all. Anybody can come in
that has standing, that has enough relationship to you to
petition the court to be your administrator. And they had
(38:54):
conflicting children coming in and petitioning to be administrators. And
then all of a sudden they start to clean out
the house. And I've had this experience and the will,
one will hidden in the couch cushion, one will hidden
in the locked cabinet. There was another will in the bedroom.
And now they have children who are Each will had
a different executor, Each will had different beneficiaries, and they
(39:18):
had all the kids litigating this state and which will
do you think they held valid in the court where
she lived because it wasn't New York. This would not
have been the decision in New York because the state
allowed something called the holographic will, which you just had
to prove the handwriting and that it was her signature.
So the couch cushion will won out and the son
(39:39):
that was appointed in the will, that was stuffed into
the couch cushion became the executor and the beneficiary. So
you don't want to have this. So not only is
it enough to have a document, as Brent said, it's
how the document then gets used. Do you have your
assets lined up in conjunction with the document? Is everything
accounted for that you own? Is there a specific provision
(40:02):
for those assets? And do we have an ability to
do this without having all of this have to run
through the court. And really you are right on target
if you if you have to pay some money to
do a trust, that's not an expense, folks, that's an
investment because what the results are if you don't do
(40:25):
that planning are all the things we're talking about here today.
And you know, we go through the celebrities and Heath
Ledger another one, you know, the best joker ever? Yeah,
defined a joker?
Speaker 2 (40:38):
Yeah, I think, yeah, I think that's a really good
cautionary tale. Heath Ledger, you know, very rose to fame
very quickly. I think he executed a will. You know,
at the rise of his fame, he named his siblings
(41:00):
and his parents as his beneficiaries than when he was
the joker, he fell in love had a child. That
child never got included into his estate plan. So when
he passed prematurely and they went to probate his his will,
(41:23):
his child was not accounted for at all. Luckily in
his in that case, the parents, the beneficiaries of the
estates said no, this isn't right. He failed to plan,
but we're going to take care of of Matilda, his daughter.
(41:43):
But that doesn't always happen. I mean that that that's
the you know that that's a success story of failing
to plan because the people and the other beneficiaries took
care of of They did what should have happened. But
this is a guy who you know, he had twenty
million dollars, twenty million dollars, never didn't plan for his child.
Speaker 1 (42:06):
So this brings up several points. One is, can you
rely on people to do the right thing? No, And
the answer is, once you're gone, life changes. Their attitudes change,
their perceptions change, and suddenly perceptions become realities that are
(42:29):
not realities, and they have different influences. And sometimes it's
a spouse that's influencing one of the children and saying no,
you have to challenge this, so you don't always know
if it's the person that you're counting on to do
the right thing, whether they've changed or they're being influenced,
whatever the reason. You cannot count on people to do
(42:51):
the right thing. Write the script, put it in writing,
put it into trust, have it be fully enforceable, have
transparent and see. And the other point here, gentlemen, is
you have to update your plan.
Speaker 2 (43:05):
Absolutely, yeah. And you can't just do it one It's
not a one off. You've got to stay with it.
You've you've got to update your plan. You've got to
you know, stay current.
Speaker 1 (43:17):
Yeah. How many times do we have clients that life happens,
never change beneficiaries on life insurance policies and iras, and
you know, they get married and they got their mother
on as the beneficiary of their IRA, and the wife said,
what happens all the time. And so when when you're
(43:37):
doing this planning and we sit with clients and I
do lengthy consultations, probably the longest in the office, just
because of my experience in knowing that I have to
dig deep to get to the heart of the matter.
You have to dig and you have to ask questions
(43:58):
and people look at me and say, I never thought
of any of those things, because I've asked twenty two
what if questions, what if this happens, what if that happens?
And I do it because I've seen it happen where
you've named I'm trustee on a trust where I was
the fourth in line. I did the trust for my clients,
you know, twenty years ago, and all their family was
(44:19):
dead and it fell to me to be the trustee
of the trust. And they hadn't I hadn't talked to
them in twenty years, and all of a sudden you
get a call from another lawyer saying, oh, yeah, you're
the trustee of this trust. I said, oh okay. So
when you're in a situation where you're saying, okay, I'm
going to rely on all of these people to take
care of it. And Brett, you've worked in the MHLS
(44:41):
Mental Hygiene Legal Services, so you know that families that
have children with disabilities need to plan very carefully. Absolutely,
and we do something called a special needs trust. And
if I had a nickel for every family that came
in and said, well, I have two kids, one's doing
great and he's going to take care of his other
So I'm going to leave one hundred percent to the
(45:02):
child who who is doing well, and he's going to
take care of his brother who has the special needs.
Oh my goodness, have you just set your child with
the disability up for what could be a terrible life
because you don't know if that child you're leaving everything
is going to be alive, if they're going to be competent,
if they're going to do the right things with that money.
(45:23):
You've created all kinds of tax issues. So, Brent, what's
the solution?
Speaker 2 (45:27):
Well, yeah, I mean a special needs trust. I guess
the first and foremost is what you're doing is protecting
your eligibility for public benefits, for public assistance.
Speaker 1 (45:41):
You can take.
Speaker 2 (45:43):
A sum of money, set it aside, put it in
a supplemental needs trust, use it for trips for you know,
expenditures that are not going to Jepper eyes. Your eligibility
for public services. These individuals get social Social Security, they
(46:08):
get SSI s SI s S and Medicaid. Medicaid.
Speaker 1 (46:12):
Yeah, and most of them rely on medicaid for their existence.
Speaker 2 (46:15):
They rely on it, yep. But you can set aside
to some of money. It's not going to impact your
public assistance. You can use that money for to benefit
your life in many ways.
Speaker 1 (46:27):
So when when you're doing the planning, and these are
the wife of questions, you know who are going to
going to be your beneficiaries? Is it children? Is it grandchildren?
How do we set it up so that your children
can be protected? And I usually when I do seminars,
I line it up a spectrum of trust beneficiaries. You
have the child who is a genius who manages all
(46:48):
his own money and and takes care of everything for
the whole family, that that person is going to be
in charge of a lot of things, including his or
her own trust. On the other end of the spectrum,
you have have a child who has been disabled since birth,
who cannot function in any meaningful capacity other than with
total assistance, and that child needs full help. And in
(47:10):
between you have child with gambling problems, drinking problems, spend
thrift problems. They just can't stop spending money. So you
design your trust specifically to contemplate all of those situations.
And that's why my consultation takes it inn long, because
I'm digging into every beneficiary, every possible permutation of that plan,
looking at every asset, how do we weave the assets together?
(47:32):
You mentioned copyrights early. People have unique assets that need
to be factored in. And we have about four more minutes,
three more minutes. Let's go back furly to the case
with the surviving spouse, because this issue plays itself out
so frequently. Yeah, and fighting with the children, fighting with
(47:56):
the parents. In this case, it was the parents. So
just talk briefly about that case.
Speaker 3 (48:03):
Yeah, So that's that was another set of sad circumstances.
Wife had metastatic breast cancer. She moved to New York City,
uh to to be closer to her treatment at Memorial
Stone Cattering. Her husband didn't immediately move with her because
(48:25):
of work commitments, but she had no plan until she
was literally on her death Bend made a will that
left everything to him, left him in charge of the children,
and and and and trust for the children. So we
think that's a good plan, right, No, still fighting her.
(48:49):
Her parents apparently didn't like him very much, and as
soon as she died, they started litigating one to throw
out the will, saying that she did not have totamentric
capacity because the will was drafted and executed was while
she was sick and undergoing chemo. And then they also
were trying to disinherit and inherit him even in intestacy,
(49:14):
saying that he abandoned the wife and so he was
not entitled to his share as a surviving spouse, which
for those of you who don't know, that's that's the thing.
You can essentially be disinherited as a surviving spouse if
the party bringing that matterick and proved that you abandoned
(49:35):
your spouse.
Speaker 1 (49:37):
Really winding down on time, and the theme there is
don't wait until you're death wait to do your will,
because it's you're just opening it up for challenge. And
those parents had a really good lawyer that raised every
issue that you could possibly raise. And even if they
don't win outright, they're going to get a settlement because
they're going to drag this thing out until exactly too late.
(50:01):
So Brent Stack Verly Brown, thanks for being with us today.
We are out see you next week
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