A new law is making it easier for Florida personal representatives to access digital data—such as email, photos and social-media postings—after the account holder dies. It’s called the Florida Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act, and it’s modeled on …
2015 legislative news: Florida overhauls its elder guardianship system
Most of the 2015 legislative changes to our Probate and Trust Codes were rolled into House Bill 343, which I reported on here. This blog post is all about this year’s overhaul of our adult guardianship system, which …
2015 Florida trust and estate legislative roundup
This was another busy year on the legislative front. Most of the changes to our Probate and Trust Codes were rolled into House Bill 343, which I report on below. In this subsequent blog post I’ll report on House …
Florida Family Trust Companies: Tax and Nontax Considerations
As reported here by the WSJ, the über wealthy are increasingly setting up their own privately-held family trust companies or “FTCs” to administer their trusts. Here’s an excerpt:
It isn’t enough to have a trust fund any more. The next …
When to “Decant” a Trust. It’s getting easier to tinker with irrevocable trusts. Here’s how it works.
If you’re working with an irrevocable trust that needs fixing for some reason and the trust agreement includes an “absolute” power to invade trust principal, your first thought should be to simply re-write the trust by using Florida’s “decanting” statute …
2014 Florida trust and estate legislative roundup
Driven partly by inter-state competition for a bigger slice of the lucrative family trust business, and partly by developments in our own courts, 2014 was a busy legislative season on the trusts and estates front. Here’s my summary:
1. New …
Effective October 1, 2013, if a lawyer improperly writes himself into his client’s will, the bequest is automatically void as a matter of law under new F.S. 732.806
Effective October 1, 2013, we now have F.S. 732.806, a new statute effectively codifying existing ethics Rule 4-1.8(c) as part of our probate code, and making a violation of this ethics rule an automatic basis for voiding any part …
2013 legislative news: New legislation codifies (expands?) FL long-arm jurisdiction over non-residents in trust litigation
According to census data, Florida is the largest recipient of state-to-state migration in the U.S. Internationally, Florida remains the top state for international home buyers. So it shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone that multi-jurisdictional estates are …
Florida’s Principal & Income Act gets an update
If you’re representing a personal representative or trustee in a complicated estate or trust administration case, the "who gets what" question won’t be easy to answer. No surprise there. What may be surprising, especially to lawyers, is how large a role Florida’s …
Effective July 1, 2012, Florida now has post-divorce automatic nullification statute for beneficiary-designated non-probate assets such as life insurance, annuities, pay-on-death accounts, and retirement planning accounts
In 1951 Florida enacted a statute automatically cutting divorced spouses out of each other’s wills (currently at F.S. 732.507(2)). In 1989 Florida enacted a similar statute for revocable trusts (currently at F.S. 736.1105). These statutes were all we …