Trust documents can be the missing piece in a California partition dispute. If a home passed through a family trust, the trust instrument, amendments, schedules, deeds, accountings, and trustee records may explain who owns the property, in what shares, and whether a sale or buyout should account for reimbursements, offsets, or unequal distributions. In...
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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