The latest of my YouTube videos deals with what happens to property when you die if you own the property with another person. It addresses real estate and jointly owned bank and financial accounts.

What happens to Personal Property When You Die

I am continuing to make YouTube videos about elder law and estate planning issues. This one is about what happens to personal property when someone dies. It does not have good news for those of you who have lists of where you want your stuff to go.

Inheritance, rights and expectancy in Oregon - Did you have something to lose?

A tax lawyer once told me that an inheritance is the largest tax-free lump sum of money most people ever receive. Most wealthy Americans got their wealth because they inherited it. Parents most often leave their assets to their children, and children expect that they will inherit when their parents die. Children have an "expectation" that they will receive the wealth of the parents when the parents die. Googling the definition of “expectation” brings up the following:

the state of thinking or hoping that something, especially something pleasant, will happen or be the case.

In my office I see families in which the children are not only hoping that they will receive their parent's money, they are making life decisions based upon that hope. They are depending upon it. Sometimes they even jump the gun and begin taking and spending the money before the parents are gone.

In law, an "expectancy" is something you might get, but which you have no legal claim to. You expect your parents to leave you their money, but they don't have to. They can cut you out and leave it all to your siblings or cut everybody out and leave it to charity. They could leave you in the will but give or spend all the money before they die so you get nothing anyway. They might have named you as a beneficiary on a life insurance policy or a retirement account. You "expect" that they won't change the beneficiary, but you have no legal claim to the money until they die with your name still on the policy. If they do, you may feel like you have lost out, but in the eyes o the law you had nothing to lose.

Some expectancies are highly likely to materialize. If grandma named you in her will and she has now lost the cognitive ability to write a new will, that money is highly likely to be coming your way sooner or later. (The law assumes she can recover capacity and write a new will, so no matter how bad she is, it is still an expectancy.) Some vested legal claims are very unlikely to produce anything for you. If you buy a lottery ticket you have a legal right to the payout if your number is picked, but don't go taking out a loan on the hope it will pay off.

The difference between an expectancy and a vested right becomes important when something you hoped would happen does not. If I hoped to get some cash when grandma died, and it didn't happen, whether I can successfully sue someone may depend on whether my hope was based upon an expectancy or a right. If it is a right, I will have a document to hang my hat on. If it is an expectancy, the road may be tougher.

But it does get confusing.

If grandma named me in her will, but made a new will just before her death because my sister held a gun to her head, the second will is invalid. I have a vested right after grandma's death so long as I can prove that the second will was invalid. If grandma named me in her will, but just before her death she gave all her property to my sister because my sister held a gun to her head, I can sue my sister on behalf of my grandma's estate to recover the property wrongfully taken. In both cases I have a better claim to the money than the person who got it.

If, however, grandma changes her will or her beneficiary designations while capable and not subject to undue influence, I am out of luck. If she spends all her money on her new boyfriend or appoints an agent under a power of attorney who spends my inheritance on her care, I am similarly out of luck. If she or her agent takes all the money out of the account on which I am a beneficiary and puts it in an account for which I am not a beneficiary, I am out of luck. In these cases the change in the estate plan was not caused by wrongful behavior and the person who has the best right to the money is the person with their name on the last document signed by grandma. My expectancy is defeated.

I hate writing blog posts that end in my telling the reader he needs to consult an experienced probate attorney -- preferably the writer of this post -- but in this case it is true. If you feel wronged and are not sure whether your claim was an expectancy or a right, and whether there might be a benefit for you to take a trip the courthouse, talk to your local probate litigator.

Strategies that don't work in Oregon will contests

The nice thing about being the lawyer in will contests is that the parties to the contest are arguing about money that fell from the sky. The money belonged to the dead person. Nobody involved in the will contest earned it and nobody involved in the contest is going to leave with any less money than they had when they came to the case. Somebody in the will contest is going to get a bunch of money without having to earn it, and somebody else isn't. In the big scheme of things will contests are not that serious. Lawyers I know have clients who will go prison if the case is lost. If my clients lose, they only lose the opportunity to spend somebody else's money.

On the other hand, an inheritance from family is for most people the largest single lump of unearned, untaxed money most people will ever receive. An inheritance can make a huge change in the life of the one who receives it and I perfectly understand why people are willing to fight tooth and nail to get the security that an inheritance can guarantee. I don't have any inheritances coming, so I get up every morning and go to work. I do it to get money. My wife suggests that I also do it because I love the practice and want to see justice done. She is wrong. I do it for the money. If I had a chance to get some money via an inheritance I would do that too.

In will contests the parties very seldom emphasize how much they want and need the dead person's money. They don't want to seem greedy so they devise other reasons for carrying on the fight. The other reasons tend to put the case on a moral plain, pitting good versus evil. There is an aspect of this to any legal case--that's why they call it "courtroom drama"-- but not everybody does it well. This article is about some of the moralizing in will contests that doesn't work.

The most common of the approaches that does not work is the, "I am pursuing this case solely to make sure that grandma's wishes are honored." If you truly believe that the only way to honor your dead grandma is to fight to the bitter end against your relatives over her money, keep quiet about it. It may be the truth and your motives may be pure--you just want to see grandma's wishes carried out. If, however, your battle to honor grandma also means you get a big pile of grandma's money, nobody is going to believe you. Enjoy your pure motives in silence. Will contests destroy families. No one believes that family-destroying litigation honors grandma  Probate lawyers have heard the "it's what she wanted" chant so often they are immune and simply don't care. The dead person is dead. He or she no longer has any wishes. Everybody involved is going to feel more kindly toward you if you simply say that you are continuing the litigation because you think you have a winnable case.

The next approach that doesn't work comes from the person who says, "Grandma was strong-willed and opinionated so her will could not have been the result of undue influence." This is often the first thing out of the mouth of someone accused of undue influence. I have written about undue influence elsewhere, so read up on it if the concept is new to you, The fact is that among elders, and maybe the population at large, strong-willed and opinionated people are easier to influence for selfish purposes than those who are more reserved and accepting. The laconic grandma who figures to just leave everything to her children--just like everybody else does--because she will be dead anyway is much harder to influence than the angry elder who dashes about changing her estate plan at every slight by a family member.

Elders often have money and need care. Little old ladies complain that elder men are looking for a nurse rather than a wife. A younger woman (in my world that means a woman in her fifties) willing to be a nurse can wrap a gruff and opinionated old man around her little finger in a matter of weeks. An elder is allowed to trade his money for care and, if he wants, he can leave everything to the person who brought him comfort in his last days. That is his right. If, however, the motives of the caregiver are selfish and the reward wildly out of proportion to the value of the care given, the recipient of this largess can expect a will contest. In the case where a distant cousin flies in from out of town--and who never made more than $30,000 a year in her life--suddenly gets a million dollars for the care given in the elder's last year, I think the cousin deserves all the agony that a will contest entails.

One of the tried and true methods of defeating an estate plan is to induce the elder to give away his major assets while still alive. That way the will is still good, but all the property is gone. A lot of my litigation involves unwinding gifts so that if the gift was a result of dementia or undue influence the property goes to the heirs rather than the recipient of the gift. In these cases I always hear, "She forced me to accept those gifts."

The "forced me to accept" approach is similar to the "she is strong-willed and opinionated" tactic. The recipient of the gift--often the elder's house--claims that he tried to refuse the gift but the little old lady would not take no for an answer. (But now that she is dead the recipient is, of course, morally obligated to keep the property.) Probate and elder abuse law is structured in a way that creates, in certain circumstances, an obligation to say no to gifts from old people (unless arranged by the old person's lawyer). If you are not strong enough  to stand up to old men and women and say no, then don't expect to keep the property. If you are too weak to say no and do expect to keep the gift, then you should  get your gift in cash rather than real estate. You will need the cash to pay your lawyer when you are named as the defendant in a financial elder abuse civil suit.

The final unsuccessful approach I want to discuss is the one that can be summed up as, "My opponent is a dirty, rotten, scoundrel." This is approach comes in a variety of flavors and tends to be part of every civil case. Parties like to use this approach. Lawyers put up with it because in the courtroom, as in life, good looking, honest, hardworking, and likeable people do better than ugly, dishonest, lazy and dislikeable people. Judge's have prejudices, and they like to see the benefits of life, including inheritances, go to good people. The problem with this approach is twofold. The first is that inheritance, like sunlight, falls on saints and sinners in equal portion. Parents usually leave their estates to their children no matter how despicable the rest of the world considers those children. Judge's know this and are only willing to let evidence of character, whether good or bad, sway them so much.

The second problem with this approach is that you can only say two bad things about another person without bringing condemnation down upon yourself. If you say three bad things, then you start to look like the scoundrel. Denigrating others is a dangerous tactic that backfires easily. People on God's list of good people spend very little time disparaging other people. If you are spending a lot of your energy doing that, you risk being removed from the list. In the courtroom, if you say three bad things about the person on the other side, the judge is more likely to consider the testimony to be evidence of your poor character than evidence of the other persons. You cannot beat people up and still be the good guy.

Witnesses in will contests are more likely to discredit their own testimony than to have it discredited by others. There are no juries to influence and judges have seen a lot. If the judge senses that a witness is covering up  a simmering cauldron and hate for the other side, the judge may well take over the questioning, uncover that cauldron and by doing so let the witness destroy his own credibility.

The difficulties of truth-telling in Oregon will contests and elder abuse cases.

It is hard to tell the truth. The more stressful the situation, the more difficult it is.

I do probate and elder law litigation in Oregon. One of the things lawyers do in will contests and financial elder abuse cases is take depositions. The lawyers in the case put the witnesses in front of a court reporter, make them swear to tell truth, and then ask what happened. In this way the lawyers find out what the witnesses on the other side of the case will say at trial.

To prepare my client for deposition I give some hints about how to respond to the other lawyer's questions, but most of my emphasis goes into the importance of telling the truth.

Having my client tell the truth is crucial to my case, because a client who gives one untruthful answer out of twenty casts doubt on all twenty. My clients tell me that they will tell the truth. They may even understand the importance of it to the case, but more often than not they are simply incapable of it.

In litigation the lawyers each develop a story. The challenger of the will has a story whereby the will was a result of undue influence. The proponent of the will has a story in which the will truly represents the last wishes of the person who wrote it.  The judge will listen to the evidence and either accept one of the stories, or construct from what he hears a story of his own. The witnesses in deposition and trial know what story their lawyer is trying to tell and they want to help. Often, in their zeal to help, witnesses hurt their own cases.

If all the facts supported the same story, nobody would be going to court. Cases are litigated because there is a dispute as to what happened. That means some of the facts point toward the challenger's story and some of them point to the proponent. Witnesses know this and when testifying they filter their answers through the lense of how the answer fits the story their lawyer is trying to tell. When asked a question with a straightforward answer that does not fit the witnesses story, even people who are generally truthful become evasive and defensive. Evasive and defensive witnesses are bad witnesses.

Stories and real life are not the same. When we go to the movies we don't see everything every character does every minute of the day. Facts are indifferent to the stories we tell, so authors and the editors cut out anything that doesn't contribute to the story. A different author or editor would pick out different things and create a different story. In real life heros sometimes do bad things, and villains can be philanthropic. In depositions the witness may well be asked about facts that don't fit the story the witness wants to tell. Nevertheless, it is better for the case if the witness bites the  bullet and tells it the way real life presented it.  I tell witnesses this all the time, but for some people the story--the narrative--has become real life, and they are unable to say anything that doesn't fit.

Litigants must accept that their lawyer cannot hide the facts that don't support the case. His job is to present the facts in a way that make his client's story more likely than the one presented by the other side. When the litigants attempt to hide facts that don't support their case, they appear from the outside to be unconvinced of the story they are propounding. Secure people accept their imperfections, and secure witnesses accept that there are flaws in the story they are presenting to the court. If the witness is truthful about the weaknesses in his case, his testimony is credible on the facts that support his case. If the witness is untruthful and evase about the flaws in the case, the suspicion is that he is also untruthful and biased about the strengths of his case

It is my job as a lawyer in a will contest or elder financial abuse case to put the facts in context and perspective. My clients want to help me, but they help the most by providing me with the most accurate information possible. The same client who complains about all the work involved in obtaining and compiling medical or financial records, is often the first one to be manipulative of the few pieces of factual evidence I have to work with. In doing so this client--the one who has stood in the way of getting the information I need--devalues the little bit of factual information I have.

In a will contest the fight is always over someone else's money. The litigants didn't earn it and haven't lost it. The best witness is the one who recognizes that he or she has no moral right to the money and is willing to simply lay out the bare facts so that a judge can decided who gets it. The moment the witness decides to help by shading his testimony, he reduces the chance that the judge will decide in his favor.

The Cruel Economics of Will Contests in Oregon - Part I

I spend a lot of time around will contests. I represent people challenging wills and people who are defending wills against challenges. I mediate and facilitate settlement of will contest cases filed by other lawyers. I write wills that I know will be contested, and thereafter testify in court about what I did. I think a lot about will contests. In this post I want talk math of will contests.

In almost every probate someone files a will and claims that the will accurately states the wishes of the decedent (the dead person) about how his or her property should be distributed. In a will contest, a challenger alleges either that the decedent died without a will or that the estate should be distributed according to the terms of an earlier will because the will admitted to probate is void. (For more on legal strategies for challenging a will in Oregon, click here.) If the decedent died intestate--that is, without a will--the State of Oregon has written one for him. A will contest always pits one proposed distribution against another.

Ordinarily, the proponent of each will is the person who will benefit most from it. If Adam is the decedent. Cain will advocate for the will that leaves everything to Cain, and Abel will advocate for the will that leaves everything to Abel. In will contests there is no way for a court to split the baby. Either Cain wins or Able wins. For this reason, will contests are a zero sum games.

Because there are only two possible outcomes--like flipping a coin--will contests lend themselves to a mathematical computation of value. If there were a hundred dollars on a table you got to flip a coin with another person to see who gets the money, you would have a 50% chance of winning the money. The opportunity to flip for the hundred dollars is worth .5 x $100, or $50. If you got to play the game a hundred times, you would win about half of the flips. If you won fifty flips out of a hundred you would take home $5,000, or $50 per flip. In the world of probabilities this is called expected value. If you only got to play once, but were not a risk taker you might agree with the other flipper not to flip at all and simply split the money. You and the other person each would take the expected value of the opportunity and walk away with fifty dollars.

No one would do a will contest for a hundred dollars, but a person might do one if there were $500,000 on the table. If Adam had died with a nice home and/or a good sized investment account, there might be this amount for Cain and Abel to argue about. Personal injury lawyers wait around hoping for a case in which there is $500,000 to divide. Probate lawyers get these cases all the time.

When you flip a coin, you know the odds of it coming up heads or tails. It is 50/50. In a will contest, however, the odds of winning are unknown. Let's assume that Abel got to the courthouse first and it is Cain that is challenging the will that favors Abel. If the odds of Abel winning are the same as flipping a coin--50/50--then the opportunity to play is worth $250,000. That is the expected value. It is also the default settlement value of the case.

Will contests, unlike coin flips, do not lend themselves to a simple calculation of the odds of winning. Emotions run high, with both sides willing to go to court because both loved Adam more than anyone else in the world and both believe they represent what Adam really wanted. If you can set emotions aside, however, the case can be evaluated in terms of chances of success in the same way as we did with the coin and the $100. Let's say that Cain's case is weak, and everyone who looks at the cases agrees that he only has a two in ten chance of winning. The math is the same as the coin flip with different numbers: .2 x $500,000 = $100,000. Cain's case is worth $100,000, and in an emotionless world, Abel would settle by taking $400,000 and giving Cain $100,000. Both Cain and Abel, like our coin flippers, walk away with the expected value of their respective cases.

(It is important here to avoid the kinds of errors that plague gamblers and politicians. First, Abel may say, "I have an 80% chance of winning this case and taking all the money. Why should I give Cain anything?" This reasoning conflates a high likelihood of something happening with certainty. The 80% chance of winning means that if you tried this case ten times before ten different judges, Abel would lose two of the cases. In real life, Abel only gets to try the case once and that once could be one of the one that loses.)

Unlike my example with the coin flip, a will contest is not free. It is like a lottery in that there is a cost to play. The cost of a will contest is the litigation costs--both attorney fees and court costs--and those costs need to be deducted from the value of the case in the same way that the costs of a lottery ticket reduce its expected value (The expected value of a lottery ticket is always less than you paid for it). So lets say that it costs $50,000 to litigate a will contest.  If Cain settles his case on an expected value of $100,000, he would owe his lawyer $50,000 (or less if he settles early) and walk away with $50,000 in his pocket.

But wait a minute, Cain knows early on that he has an 80% chance of losing his case. Thus it is quite likely that he will have to go to court, lose the case, get nothing, and end up owing his lawyer $50,000. When you don't win the lottery, you are still out the cost of the ticket. Thus, Cain faces a situation in which he must pay $50,000 for a .2 probability of receiving $500,000. Avoiding the $50,000 debt may be more important to him than the small chance of a large payoff. If Cain is wealthy and mathematically inclined he will pursue the .2 chance of getting $500,000 every time. If Cain is very poor and has no intention of paying his lawyer unless he wins he will similarly take it every time. If Cain, however, is an average guy who takes his debts seriously he may forgo both the case and the cost. The payoff may be mathematically justifiable but the risk of loss is too great.

Abel has it better. He only has a two in ten chance of getting nothing and ending up with a big bill for attorney fees. If he has a lot of money and is mathematically inclined, he will try or settle the case indifferent to the outcome because he knows that over the long run it was a wise investment. The middle class Abel will defend the case, but probably settle by giving Cain his $100,000 expected value. By settling the middle class Abel walks away with $400,000 and avoids the 20% risk of losing everything. If Cain won't settle for the expected value, Abel takes the case to court. If he wins he gets all the money and if he loses he is still middle class. The poor Abel will view the $500,000 potential inheritance as life-changing. He really does not want to walk away with nothing and continue being poor. He will settle by paying Cain somewhat more than the $100,000 expected value in order to eliminate the small risk of receiving nothing. Poverty makes for bad bargaining positions.

The expected value of a will contest is easy to figure if you can agree on the probability of success. In the real world, however, that seldom happens. Both sides think they have iron clad cases. In a subsequent post I will address the role of contingency fees on the math of will contests and then I will write about some factors that lead us to mistakes in determining the probability that a case will succeed.

Heir Hunters and How They Work When You Die Without A Will

I have written before about dying without a will and the fact that if you decide to do so the State of Oregon will write one for you. To figure out what will the state has written, lawyers consult a chart. If you die with children, your children get the money. If you don't have children, your parents get the money. After that your relatives get the money based upon how close a relative they are. In most cases, figuring out who gets the money when someone dies without a will is fairly easy. But sometimes it is not. When it is not, we probate lawyers run into people who make their money by finding distant heirs and taking a chunk of the inheritance in return for connecting the heirs to the probate. These folks are heir hunters.

I recently got a case in which a fellow died without a will, had no children and no living parents. His estate ended up going to a couple of elderly aunts and a fistful of cousins. The dead guy had not been the family type and therefore the relatives who stood to inherit barely knew who he was. In addition, the aunts and cousins were scattered throughout the United States. As the lawyer handling the estate it was my job to find all these relatives and make sure each one got his or her inheritance. To do this I hired a genealogist and put her to work trying to find the names and addresses of the aunts and cousins. If she found them, I would send them a notice telling them that they were entitled to an inheritance. But as I went to work trying to find these people, so did the "heir hunters." I went looking for heirs to fulfill my obligations to the court as an administrator of the estate. The heir hunters went looking for a cut of the action.

Heir hunters scour the probate filings and the death notices that must be filed in every probate. They are looking for cases like the one I described.  The heir hunter then attempts to locate the heirs before I can find them and sign them up as clients. The heir hunter tells the heir that he or she is entitled to an inheritance, but does not give the name of the dead relative or the court in which the probate is pending. The business then offers to "represent" the heir in the probate in return for a percentage of the inheritance.

If the heir signs a contract with the heir hunter the heir agrees to pay a percentage of his or her inheritance--from 20% to 50% but usually 33%--to the heir hunters. The heir hunter then refers the case to an attorney that has an ongoing business relationship with the heir hunting company. That lawyer then contacts me to tell me that he represents the heir. The rules that I must follow tell me that if person has a lawyer, I cannot talk to them directly, but can only talk to their lawyer. From that point on, I can only communicate with that heir through the lawyer for the heir hunters.

If there are a lot of heirs, one heir hunting company may end up representing many or even all the the people entitled to an inheritance. In the case I described, I found about half the heirs before the heir hunters could sign them up, but two different companies got to the remaining heirs before I could find them. The heirs that signed with the heir hunters will pay a percentage of their inheritance to the company. The ones I found will not.

You might ask what heir hunters actually do for the heirs they find. As far as I can tell--not much. So far the heir hunters in my case have notified me that they represent some of the heirs and asked me to provide them with further court filings. Neither of lawyers representing the heir hunters have filed an "appearance" in the case, something that would have entitled them to copies of all pleadings as a matter of right. I brought this up to one of the lawyers and was informed that he had not filed an appearance on behalf of his client because the filing fee was so high. It does not seem that he intends to actually do anything in the case except wait for me to finish the administration and collect his percentage.

In my experience, the heir hunters do little other than connect the heir to the lawyer doing the probate of the estate. Anything further than that--such as actually doing some work to protect their client's interest-- cuts into their profit.  I do my best to find all the heirs in cases like this. I hire a professional genealogist who charges by the hour and I pay her a lot. She will find the heirs, but sometimes the heir hunters find them  first. If I have a choice, I put her to work before I file the probate. That way I can get to the heirs before the notice is published. Sometimes, however, the probate needs to be opened quickly in order to protect estate property. In those cases it is a race, and when I lose the race the heirs lose a percentage of their inheritance.

A post like this should end with some advice. I guess my advice would be that if you are contacted by heir hunters attempt to delay. String them along while you talk to relatives--near and far--and try to find out who died. Waiting will also allow the person administering the estate time to find you. Probate administration takes a while. The heir hunter may say that action on your part is urgent, but it really isn't. Hold off and look around. If you get a lead on a dead relative who might have left you money, call the state court where you think he might have died. If you find something, look up the lawyer who is doing the probate. He will be glad to hear from you because he has probably been looking for you. Give the lawyer your address and get all your inheritance, not just the portion left after the heir hunter has taken its cut.

Legal Documents that Promise Too Much

I wrote in an earlier post about the fact that most estate planning trusts are simply unable to deal with the wide variety of ways in which incapacity —usually dementia of one sort or another—shows its ugly face. Despite the best efforts of trust designers, families still end up asking a court to intervene, and when that happens the trust can make solutions harder rather than easier. I think that we elder law lawyers are asking our documents to do too much.

I have written before about the role of legal forms in the practice of law and where lawyers get their forms. I completely rewrote my forms a couple of years ago to shorten and simplify them. I started doing it because a client asked me to simplify a long trust (a trust from a national provider of forms). As I went about taking out clauses that I had never seen anybody care about, I realized that my own forms were also bloated with clauses that had found their way into trusts decades ago and had simply been copied from one trust to another with no regard to whether they served any real purpose.

In the process of shortening and simplifying my estate planning forms—and translating them from legalese into plain human English at the same—I discovered that not only were my forms bloated as a matter of prose style, but most of the forms I use substantively attempted to do too much.

A will identifies your heirs (the people who would get your money if you had no will) and then tells the court who you want to get your stuff. The will may also tell the court who gets your money if one of the persons mentioned in your will dies before you do. I have had clients get seriously carried away with this question of out-of-order deaths, asking me what would happen if they were at a family reunion and all their relatives were killed by a meteor crashing into earth. I can answer that question, but I really don't want to put the answer in a will.

Life is unpredictable. The math of large numbers says we should treat highly improbable events as impossible. The same math says that when the numbers are large enough, the highly improbable event is also inevitable. Thus, the chances of winning the Powerball lottery are so small that it is reasonable for any person to consider it impossible. Nevertheless, when enough people play, it is inevitable that someone will eventually win.

Time spent preparing for low probability events takes time away from preparing for more probable dangers. Legal documents that attempt to anticipate all possibilities, I believe, are worse for a client than those that limit their scope to the most common situations. The complex language and legal structures built into estate plans designed to meet every contingency become less effective because of the complexity. An estate plan that anticipated every possible situation that life could throw at a person would be thousands of pages long. It would be unreadable, ignored, and worse than no estate plan at all.

The situation is akin to the parent who keeps his child in doors in front of the television all the time to avoid the risk of abduction by kidnappers—a low probability event—and as a consequent risks obesity and poor health—a fairly common risk.

I am moving toward an approach in which legal documents should be humble. They should acknowledge that they cannot anticipate every eventuality—life being simply too unpredictable—and rather than trying to take courts out of the plan, attempt to embrace what the court system offers.

Estate planners write trusts that anticipate capacity and plan for it. Incapacity, however, comes in too many ways and forms. I suggest that we trust writers continue to plan for the common case, but rather than attempting to make a trust that will never end up in court, we write our trusts to embrace the court system when unanticipated situations arise. Rather than trying to avoid conservatorships at all costs, the trusts could admit that some times they cannot be avoided and allow for the management of trust assets by a conservator during the lifetime of the incapacitated elder.

Similarly, I think people writing wills ought to quit tax planning for people who don't currently have enough wealth to pay estate taxes, quit writing trusts for minors who are unlikely to ever receive anything, and rely more on the law of intestacy. Planning for events that have a low likelihood is not harmless. It complicates and weighs down the plan, making it worse than it otherwise would have been.

It is time, I think for those of us who do this sort of thing to take a course in humility and write short, plain English documents that do a couple things well rather than everything badly.

Oregon Elder Law - The role of family gifts in estate administration.

     In my last column I talked about gifts between family members during the time that an elder is depending on family for support and long term care. Today I want to talk about gifts and how they affect the wills, trusts and the administration of estates.

Gifts that undo an estate plan.

     Your estate is the money and property you have on the date of your death. The money goes first to pay your bills and then to the people named in your will or trust. If you are old and sick and rich you may find long-estranged children returning to the fold and new friends willing to share your last days with you. Sometimes they are there out of love. Sometimes they want your money.

     The most common method of defeating the distribution plan contained in a will or a trust is to convince an elder to give away all of her money before she dies. As I wrote in my last post, a gift is complete when the property is handed over, and thereafter the recipient can do whatever she wants with the property given. Most wills give a parent's estate to the children in equal shares. Sometimes there is a child interested in getting more than an equal share. The best way for that child to turn that obnoxious will or trust into scrap paper is to get dad to sign over all his property while he is still alive. If he has nothing left at his death, the will means nothing.

     The traffic in my office, suggests that the last years of a wealthy elder's life is a never-ending parade of relatives jamming papers in front of the elder for signature. Most of these papers transfer money or property from the elder to the person who came up with the paper. They have all sorts of reasons why the elder should sign and why it needs to be done right now. “I need to be on your account so I can pay your medical expenses.” “If you don't put me on the house, you will go to probate and the government will get all your money.” “If you don't give me this money now you will have to pay taxes on it.” The creativity of these folks is quite astounding, but none of the schemes benefit anybody but the person who receives the property. No matter how sick you are, there is no good reason for giving away your money because a relative or your hairdresser thinks it's a good idea. If these people really cared about you they would be offering to pay the cost of a visit to a competent estate planning lawyer.

     Deathbed gifts often lead to litigation in which the people named in the will or trust attempt to recover what was given away. These cases employ a lot of probate lawyers. The cases are nasty and expensive, and no matter who wins, the lawyers get a big chunk of the estate.

Gifts and Sibling Tension.

Gifts that Complicate Estate Administration

     Let's assume you died without giving away everything you own. Gifts are still going to play a role what happens.

     Whether you like it or not, your children are going to treat the administration of your estate—the distribution of your money and belongings—as some sort of final reckoning of everything you did for them and everything they did for you. Death is time to balance the books and settle accounts for everything that happened while you were alive.

     A lot of families who end up in my office have one member who needed more help through life than did the others. Sometimes the help was necessary because of an obvious physical or mental illness. The healthy siblings in these cases are usually understanding. Other times the disability is addiction, irresponsibility or congenital laziness, and the children who did not get the extra help are not inclined to be as forgiving. They see the recipient of lifetime gifts as having a balance on the books that, upon death, needs to be taken into account when it comes to passing out the inheritance. The recipient of the parental largess, who is often still broke and in need, doesn't see it that way.

     Similarly, the child who has selflessly given up time and career opportunities to provide care for a parent, sees the administration of the estate as a time to be financially recognized for the sacrifice he made while the other children pursued their personal aims. Generous and giving people often want their self-sacrifice to be rewarded and there is no better way to do that than when dividing father's estate.

     Wills and trusts, however, seldom take these lifetime gifts into account. The estate is divided equally between the children. The child who has lived off his parents for decades gets no deduction for the gifts he received, and the one who toiled to provide care gets no credit for his sacrifice.

Thwarted in their desire for a final account that acknowledges the gifts given by the elder and the gifts given by the children, the children focus their frustration on what seems to outsiders as something arbitrary. Sometimes it is a bank account. Sometimes it is a lamp. Whatever it is, it is a symbol for their complaints against each other and their resentments against the dead elder. 

 

     As I wrote in my first post on gifts, mutual gifting is the way we take care of the those family members who need help. Sometimes it is the older members helping out the younger. Sometimes it is the younger members helping the elders. But don't be fooled. Gifts have long and lasting effects. No matter what your age, give with care and receive with caution. A gift is without expectation of repayment. It is not, however, without consequences.

      There is an adage that the question is not whether to give, but when and how. Put as much thought into your gifts as you do your estate plan. Your will or trust, your beneficiary designations, and the gifts you give should form a coherent whole. Each piece should compliment the others and advance the goal of leaving everyone in the family better off. You cannot eliminate the possibility of your funeral being the scene of rancor and litigation, but by thinking carefully about the gifts you give and receive you can significantly reduce the chances.

Using a Conservatorship to protect your inheritance.

A conservatorship is designed to prevent a financially incapable elder from wasting his or her money due to deteriorating thinking skills. The socially acceptable motive for rescuing the senior citizen from himself is that the elder may need that money for his own needs, particularly long term care. A child who sees his elderly parent sending her life savings to television evangelists or Caribbean scammers may be legitimately concerned that mom is spending the money she may need for long term care. He also might be legitimately concerned that his mother is wasting his inheritance. This article explores the risks and rewards of using a conservatorship to prevent mom and dad from spending the money their children hope to inherit.

A conservator can be appointed for a person who is “unable to manage financial resources.” This is a wide open door. Conservators get appointed because old women are sending all their money to crooked preachers or old men are spending all their money on hookers. Many times a child seeks a conservatorship because another child is bleeding the parent dry with pleas for money that the kid could earn himself if he had the gumption to go out and get a job. Whenever siblings are involved, there will be the suspicion that the one seeking the conservatorship is less concerned with the well-being of the elder than the well-being of his potential inheritance.

      Can you use a conservatorship to protect your inheritance? Yes. But there are dangerous pitfalls along the way.

      Let's say elderly mom has three kids: Moe, Larry and Curly. Moe and Larry are out in the workplace earning a living. Curly is living with mom and taking care of her and having conversations like this.

“Mother, I baked you a birthday cake.”

“Oh, thank you Curly. You are the only one of my sons who ever bakes me a cake.”

“That's right mother. Moe and Larry don't care about you like I do.”

“What can I do to repay your kindness, Curly?”

“Oh, nothing. I do it out of love. But if you insist on doing something, you could sign over to me all those shares of Microsoft stock you bought in 1985.”

“This is such a nice cake, Curly. Bring me those papers.”

Moe is not happy about this. He reads my blog and knows that one of the best ways to get around a will is to have the elder give away all his or her money before death. In our case, mother's will may split her estate equally between her three children, but if Curly gets his name on on the assets prior to death, there is nothing to transfer by will. Moe and Larry are out of luck.

Moe figures that he will ask that a conservator be appointed for mom on the grounds that she is trading Microsoft stock for birthday cakes, thereby depleting her financial condition for frivolous reasons. He doesn't make the mistake of asking that he be appointed. This would set the stage for a courtroom sibling dispute, which judges never like. He instead will ask that a professional—an neutral independent—be appointed. That way he cannot be accused of trying to get his hands on mom's money himself. Once a conservator is appointed, the professional will make sure that mom's remaining property stays put so that all three brothers inherit it when mom dies. The professional conservator might even be able to get that Microsoft stock back in mom's name using Oregon financial elder abuse statute.

But there is a danger.

The big danger is the mom will be so angry when she receives the papers saying that Moe wants to take her money and give it to a professional—in her mind, a stranger—that she will call her lawyer and tell him to write a new will that disinherits Moe. This happens all the time. Even if a conservator is appointed, mom has the right to have a lawyer and to change her will. The capacity necessaryto write or change a will is far lower than that necessary to manage financial affairs. All mom has to know is the names of her children, what she owns, the fact that she is signing a will, and the effect the will will have. If she knows what she owns, can name her children, and knows that by signing the will she is disinheriting Moe, she has the capacity to change her will. She also has a reason for changing her will; to punish Moe for taking her to court.

A lot of families have a Curly—that son (or daughter) who fails to thrive and spends his life hanging around his parents home and living off handouts from mom or dad. The kids who did thrive don't think much of these family members. Professional fiduciaries dislike them as well and tend to want to separate them from the parent. Parents, however, may love their children equally or even favor the neer-do-well child. By the time one gets to considering a conservatorship there may be in place a stable decades-old family dynamic in which the the parents give extra support to one while the other, more successful children, complain. A child who disturbs this dynamic does so at some peril.

A will signed by a person subject to a conservatorship will always get close scrutiny by the courts. Even if she had the capacity to disinherit Moe, Moe might challenge the will on the basis that Curly used “undue influence” to get her to do it. In undue influence case, the lawyers make lots of money. Judges are successful people and tend to be unsympathetic to folks like Curly who live off their parents. That does not mean, however, that Moe is guaranteed a win. Elders can distribute their estate as they see fit. Giving all the money to the person who was with them the most is neither unusual or unjust.

The moral of this story is that if you want to do the right thing and protect mom from herself, your motives should be pure. If it is truly her that you are thinking about, it should be of no consequence that she disinherits you. If your motives were not pure—you were doing it to prevent your inheritance from disappearing—then you are taking risk. The risk is that your efforts will not be appreciated and you will be disinherited anyway. If you are not disinherited you win. If you are disinherited, you took the risk and lost. 

Anatomy of an Oregon Will

The old estate planners used to say to me, "no matter how much the clients want it, there is no such thing as a simple will." I didn't believe it. I figured it was just one of those things people say to make what they do for a living seem a little harder and more complicated than it really is. Reluctantly, as the years go by, I am coming around to their point of view.

There may be no such thing as a simple will, but there is such a thing as a short will. My average will for a middle class older couple with adult children is two pages long. The will is written in English and has no clauses that a high school graduate couldn't understand. Nevertheless, it is not simple. Each sentence, each paragraph, has a distinct purpose. I explain these purposes over and over again in my office, so I thought I would do so here.

For whom is the will written?

This is widely misunderstood. Every written document, whether a newspaper of a business contract, is written for an audience. The audience for will is not the relatives of the deceased, it is the probate judge who will oversee the wills administration. A remarkable number of people do not understand that a will is not self-executing. The power to administer the will comes from the court. You may be nominated in the will to be the executor of your mother's estate. The nomination is a request that the court appoint you. The court will try to honor your mother's request, but it may also decline to do so. You have no power or authority until the nomination in the will is affirmed by a court order. The will may leave you your mother's collection of antique hockey sticks, but you don't get your grubby hands on them until a judge says it's okay.
Allow me to say this again. A will has no power or authority until it is filed with the court and a judge appoints an executor.

Once a will is filed with the court it becomes a public record and any person wandering into the probate department is entitled to look at it and copy it. Therefore, once the person who wrote the will has died, there is never any reason to keep the contents of the will secret. Often I see a relative or group of relatives hoarding a will--refusing to let the other relatives know what is in it. This is crazy. If the will is going to be effective, it is going to end up as a publicly available document. There is no reason to keep the contents secret.

The first sentence.

The first sentence of a will declares the document to be a will, says who is writing it, and revokes all previous wills.  The best practice is to have old superseded wills revoked by a written document that has just as many witnesses as the will itself. The first sentence of the will takes care of that.

The listing of family.

The next part of the will generally tells whether the writer is married and lists his or her immediate family. This part of the will helps the court and the lawyers understand who is related to who and who is entitled to notice that the will is being administered. All persons who receive something and all natural heirs of a dead person are entitled to notice when a will is being administered. Just because a person is listed in the family section doesn't mean that person gets something, but if the familial tie is close the person is probably entitled to written notice of the probate.

Appointment of a personal representative.

The next section of a will often appoints a personal representative. This is the person who--if she isn't a notorious embezzler--will be appointed to be the executor of the estate. A personal representative and executor are the same thing. No matter what he or she is called, the person who has to gather up all the dead person's property, pay all the bills, and eventually distribute the money to the people named in the will, all under the eagle-eye supervision of the court staff. Naming your favorite son as your personal representative is not doing him a favor. Being personal representative is an annoying and nasty job. Nobody likes doing it. If you get the urge to spread the pain by naming a couple of your children as co-personal representatives, don't. Judges hate it, lawyers hate it, and it costs twice as much when--as always happens--the co-personal representatives don't get along and each asks for his or her own lawyer.

The last sentence in the paragraph appointing a personal representative allows the person you chose to serve without bond. The bond protects the heirs from a personal representative who decides to abscond with the money in the estate. Waiving the bond safes the estate money, unless of course you chose an executor who steals all the estate property. In that case, waiving the bond was not such a good idea.

Specific Gifts

In this part of the will we get down to giving stuff away. Giving things away is done in two stages. The first stage is specific gifts. A specific gift is to say "I give my baseball card collection to my cousin, Homer." Then you hope that the baseball card collection is still there twenty-five years later when you die. The most common specific gift is to give all your personal property to your spouse or your children. This is a specific gift of your stuff--your couch and your plates and your bust of Elvis that you got on that trip to Graceland. Lawyers and judges want the family quietly to divide this stuff so everyone is happy. Nobody except the family cares about this crap. If you choose to get in a pissing match with your relatives about it, the legal professionals will make fun of you behind your back. You need to make enough peace with your family to divide the personal property without going to court.

Some people have long lists of who they want to get what. My advice is to give the stuff away when you are alive. Once you are dead, by the time someone responsible gets around to inventorying your personal things, most of it will be gone anyway. Safes will be empty and safe deposit boxes will be filled with scrap paper. It doesn't happen all the time, but it happens a lot. If you want to be sure, give it away when you are alive.

Gifts of cash are specific gifts. If you give cousin Homer $25,000 instead of the baseball cards, that amount comes off the top. These kinds of specific gifts can get you in trouble. To see how, continue reading.

The Residue

"Residue," is a legal word for "everything else." It is the part of the will where the money is -- or at least should be. The residue is a legal container that expands or contracts to hold whatever you own at the moment of your death. If you are an average Joe or Josephine, the container holds your house, that rental you bought a while back, your stock account at Edward Jones, and what's left in your bank account. If you sell your house and use up your stocks paying for long term care, the residue of your estate will be small. If you win the lottery or get a big inheritance two days before you die, your residue will be big. When lawyers look at a will the first thing they look at is the residue clause. There are two reasons for this. One, the recipients of the residue are normally the people who get the biggest chunk of the estate. Two, the residue contains the funds that will pay the lawyer.

A typical residue clause uses fractions or percentages. "I give the residue of my estate to my three children in equal shares." Each child gets one third. Fractions (or percentages) allow the legal container to get bigger or grow smaller without changing how the whole of it will be distributed. Whether it be big or small, the children each get a third.

The residue also pays the costs of administering the will. The lawyer and the personal representative get paid from the residue. Income taxes get paid from the residue. Costs of keeping and selling real estate come from the residue. If you are fortunate enough to have to pay estate taxes, payment may have to come from the residue. These costs come out of the residue, and what remains is distributed to the people named in the will to receive it.  

Your best bet is to leave all your major assets in the residue. If you are an average person and you give everything away as specific gifts--your house to Able, your stocks to Cain, and your bank accounts to Seth--you may well have given everything away. There will be no residue and your personal representative will have a lot harder time of it. It will get done, mind you, but it will be more complicated and more expensive.

The worst cases of emptying the residue with specific gifts come from giving gifts of set dollar amounts. More than one elder has dribbled out generous cash gifts to distant relatives--ten thousand here, twenty thousand there. The elder then spent most of her money on long term care so that when she finally dies, the distant relatives take it all and the children named to receive the residue, get little or nothing.

The residue is designed to hold the bulk of the estate. Wills work best when you use the residue clause for the purpose for which it was designed..

The other stuff.

After giving away what you own, most wills go on with a lot of other stuff. You might have a trust to hold money in case some of your estate goes to a child. You might make some tax provisions. You might set the rules for who gets the money if someone named in the will dies before you do. As you move farther and farther away from the clauses that give stuff away the smaller the chance that anybody will actually ever read what it says. Some lawyers will tell you that the other stuff is really important. They might be right. Others will admit its there because it has always been in the form they use, and if it is in the form, there must be a good reason..

The signing

The will must be signed by the person making it. The signature must be witnessed by two people, and the witnesses must sign as witnesses before the person making the will dies. You cannot get around this requirement by hand writing your will or any other way. If you don't have the signatures of two witnesses, the thing is no good.

Lawyers add a document called a self-proving affidavit that is not required but makes the getting the will admitted to probate a lot easier. If you go to a lawyer, let him or her take care of that. If you are trying this on your own, don't worry about it. You have enough to not screw up without worrying about the affidavit.