Yes, in most cases, you can force a trustee to produce trust documents in California, either by petitioning the probate court under Probate Code section 17200 or, if a partition case is already pending, through ordinary civil discovery. Trust documents can be the missing piece in a California partition dispute. If a home passed...
Continue reading ›Anytime a litigant wants to file a lawsuit, a threshold question is where the lawsuit should be filed. Specifically, the question is what county should get to hear the action. This process is called determining “venue,” and it can become quite a complicated endeavor. This is because the “correct” county for action will depend...
Continue reading ›When a loved one passes away, probate proceedings are hopefully not the first thing on their relatives’ minds. Probate is, however, an inevitability, even when a trust is present and effective. But inheritance is not always the blessing that the public conscious imagines it to be. The simple truth is that owning property in...
Continue reading ›A Heggstad petition is a unique legal maneuver in probate court that a party can use to establish the existence of a trust. Normally, if a party wants to show that the property at issue is in a family trust, they have to produce evidence of a transfer of the property into the trust....
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