New Jersey Trust and Estate Litigation Lawyers

Our attorneys have significant experience handling estate, trust, and fiduciary litigation. We represent clients in connection with enforcing or contesting a wide variety of estate planning documents, including:

• Probate of wills
• Will construction issues
• Validity of trust documents
• Contested accountings for both estates and trusts
• Proceedings for the discovery and turnover of an estate or trust assets
• Other trusts and estate-related matters.

CONTESTED WILLS

If a beneficiary in a will who expected a large bequest and got a much smaller one (or nothing at all), or a bequest was made to a formerly unknown heir, a contested will litigation can arise.

There are several common grounds we see for contesting a will. Those grounds include:

• Undue influence
• Coercion
• Forgery
• Fraud
• Lack of testamentary capacity

In order to contest a will, the person who wants to contest the will must have standing. That means that the person must already be a named beneficiary in the will. People who would have received a bequest if the deceased had died without a will (“heirs at law”) also have standing.

Lastly, a person who was named in a prior will, but who is not named in the will submitted to probate, or who received a smaller bequest in the probated will, has standing to contest the will.

BREACH OF FIDUCIARY DUTY

A fiduciary is a person or entity (such as a bank) that has a special relationship of trust with another person. In estate planning, the executor of a will is a fiduciary to the named beneficiaries of the will. In a trust, the trustee is a fiduciary to the beneficiaries named in the trust agreement.

Other examples of a fiduciary would be a person who was named in a will as a guardian to a minor or an agent named in a power of attorney.

There are several actions that a fiduciary could take that could be deemed a breach of their fiduciary duty:

• Embezzlement of the trust’s assets by the trustee or of the probate estate by the executor or administrator
• Failure of the trustee to follow the terms of the trust agreement
• Failure of the executor to follow the deceased’s instructions in the will
• Removal of assets from the trust without the knowledge or approval of the beneficiaries