Practice area
California Estate Planning and Probate Attorneys
Most estates pass without a fight. The ones that do not usually involve real property, a trustee who has stopped communicating, or a change to a plan that was made late and under pressure.
We prepare estate plans and we litigate them. Because so much California estate value sits in real property, these matters often overlap with the title and partition work we handle on the real estate side.
What we handle
Estate & Probate matters
Probate
Probate is the court supervised process of transferring what someone owned after they die.
Probate Code sections 8000, 8100 and followingProbate Administration
If you have been named to administer an estate, you have taken on legal duties. The people who inherit have the right to hold you to them.
Fiduciary dutyProbate Litigation
Probate litigation is what happens when the estate itself becomes the dispute. It is the court fight over who inherits, who is in charge, and what belongs to the estate at all.
Probate Code section 850Trust Litigation
Trust litigation has one deadline that ends more cases than any argument does.
Probate Code sections 16061.7 and 16061.8Trusts
A trust that was signed but never funded does not do what the family was told it would do.
FundingWills
A will decides who receives what, and it does so through the probate court rather than around it.
Probate Code sections 6110 and 6111