How Many Lawyers Does It Take To Manage A Trust?
It is possible to handle your estate plan by yourself without hiring a lawyer. Estate law is one of the areas of law designed to make it easy and inexpensive for individuals to have recourse to the court system when they need it. By nature, your estate plan must continue to do its job after you are gone. You can choose almost any adult to fulfill the role of personal representative of your estate; the person must only reside in Florida and not have been declared legally incompetent by the courts. In other words, you can appoint a family member to be the personal representative of your estate. People usually hire lawyers to help them set up trusts, but this is not a legal requirement. Do it yourself trusts can backfire. You can make costly mistakes, or the trust can simply vanish into thin air if the family member in charge of it loses track of the relevant paperwork. The ideal choice is to hire more than one lawyer; if you hire only one, make sure that he or she is trustworthy. For advice about setting up a trust, and for guidance throughout the process of managing the trust, contact a Tampa estate planning lawyer.
The Lawyer Who Gambled His Client’s Trust Money: A Cautionary Tale
When you establish an irrevocable trust, the property in the trust no longer belongs to you. The trust instrument determines what happens to the trust assets, and the trustee named in the trust instrument has a legal obligation to follow those instructions. Revocable trusts become irrevocable when the grantor dies.
A Florida lawyer helped his client set up a trust, of which the lawyer was the trustee. The beneficiaries were the grantor’s son and daughter, who live in Pennsylvania. The trouble was that the lawyer had a gambling addiction. After he had gambled away his personal assets, he transferred money from the trust to his personal accounts and then spent it at the Hard Rock Casino in Broward County. When a criminal investigation began, the lawyer traveled to Pennsylvania to apologize to the beneficiaries. His criminal case in Florida is currently pending.
Separation of Powers in Trust Law
The grantor of the trust was wise to hire a lawyer to set up his trust and act as its trustee; it is not possible to know, based on published reports, whether the grantor could have known about the lawyer’s gambling problem. The safest thing you can do with trusts is to apply the separation of powers. Since you will eventually not be there to see what happens to your trust, and since an irrevocable trust legally isn’t your business, anyway, it is safest not to put all the power in the hands of one person. Ideally, you should have one lawyer help you draft the trust instrument and appoint another lawyer as the trustee.
Contact David Toback About Separation of Powers in Trust Law
A Central Florida estate planning lawyer can help you establish a trust and ensure that it operates according to plan. Contact David Toback in Tampa, Florida to set up a consultation.
Source:
weartv.com/news/local/florida-lawyer-accused-of-stealing-17-million-from-clients-gambling-the-money-at-casino
