In Florida the law is clear: you can’t contest a will until after the testator dies. F.S. 732.518. But that doesn’t necessarily mean you can’t preempt a will contest before the testator dies.
For example, suppose you’re working with an older client with diminishing capacity whose will is sure to be contested. What if you initiated a voluntary guardianship proceeding and obtained a final judgment specifically approving the ward’s will and specifically finding that the ward’s will is NOT the product of undue influence, fraud, etc? Unlike in a will contest, you’d have the actual testator in front of the judge testifying as to the validity of his will. This judgment should collaterally estopp re-litigation of these same issues in a will contest after the testator/ward dies if all interested persons in this estate were given notice of the guardianship proceeding and an opportunity to be heard. Presto! Will contest has been preempted.
That’s basically what happened in a recent California case that received some national attention in a short piece by Pamela A. MacLean of the The National Law Journal entitled In Appellate First, Attacks on Wills Barred After Estate Owner Dies. Here’s an excerpt:
For the first time, a California appellate court has said that when a conservator seeks court approval of an estate plan, while the subject is living, any challenge to the will must be raised at that hearing — not when the person dies. [Murphy v. Murphy, No. A115177.]
The appellate decision is the first in the country to say attacks on wills would be barred after the estate owner dies, if there has been a court-approved substituted judgment, according to David Baer, attorney at Hanson Bridgett Marcus Vlahos & Rudy in San Francisco. Baer represented the daughter of William J. Murphy in an estate battle with her brother.
The opinion essentially bulletproofs the will of a person found incompetent and placed under the protection of a conservator, if the court OKs a revised estate plan, according to Baer. He added that the court made clear that notice to potential objectors is required to protect due process.
“You essentially can’t contest an estate plan that has been approved in by a substituted judgment order,” Baer said. “A substituted judgment is an opportunity to get a court order for the conservator to sign various instruments,” he said.
The 1st District Court of Appeal in San Francisco held in the June 26 decision that an attack on such a court order, after the conservatee dies, is barred by collateral estoppel rules. Murphy v. Murphy, No. A115177.
Lesson learned?
One of the most challenging attorney-client scenarios is the older client with diminishing capacity. There are lots of solid articles/resources out there addressing this scenario from an estate-planning perspective [click here for Older Clients With Diminishing Capacity And Their Advance Directives (by A. Frank Johns)], but I haven’t seen any that points to guardianship proceedings as a tool for heading off future will contests. The linked-to California case could provide a template for that strategy.
Blog Post Update:
As an update to this post, in this post the Pennsylvania Fiduciary Litigation Blog pointed me to an article published in “Trusts and Estate Fiduciary Litigation Update,” August 20, 2008, by Samantha E. Weissbluth, senior counsel, and John P. Mounce, summer associate, Foley & Lardner LLP, Chicago, entitled Barred by Lunatics Law. The article discusses the implications of the California case linked-to above and concludes with the following observations:
The lesson here is that court approval of an individual’s estate plan when that individual is under a conservatorship will protect the plan against any posthumous contest to it (assuming, of course, that interested parties receive notice of the conservator’s petition to approve the plan).
Those of you with clients in dicey family situations in which you worry about a posthumous contest might want to weigh the risks, costs and public nature of a conservatorship proceeding (or some kind of declaratory judgment action if permitted in your state) to try and bulletproof your client’s plan.
And, attorneys representing clients disgruntled by a now incapacitated relative’s estate plan should certainly come armed and ready for battle upon receiving notice of an action for court approval of that plan.