Getting served with a lawsuit is stressful, and the instinct for a lot of people is to set the papers aside and hope the problem goes away. It will not. In Kentucky, ignoring a lawsuit is one of the most expensive mistakes you can make, because it can hand the other side a judgment against…
If you are worried that one of your heirs might drag your estate into court, you have probably heard about the “no-contest clause” — sometimes called an in terrorem clause, which is Latin for “in fear.” It is a provision that says anyone who challenges the will forfeits whatever they were going to receive under…
One of the more uncomfortable questions I get from estate planning clients is some version of this: “Can I leave one of my kids out of my will?” Usually there’s a story behind it — an estrangement, a child who has already received more than their share, or a worry about how an inheritance would…
Some estate cases are about making a wrongdoer write a check. Others are about getting property back — the farm deeded away under suspicious circumstances, the account emptied the month before death, the house an executor quietly bought from the estate he controlled. For those cases, Kentucky equity supplies one of its oldest and most…
Winning a judgment against a dishonest executor is only half the battle. The other half is collecting it — and executors who loot estates have an unfortunate habit of being broke by the time anyone catches them. This is where the executor’s bond, an obscure document most beneficiaries never think about, can become the most…
Every Kentucky estate is supposed to end. Debts paid, taxes filed, assets distributed, a final settlement approved by the court, executor discharged, file closed. But some estates simply… don’t. The executor stops filing, stops distributing, stops responding, and the estate drifts along, technically open, with beneficiaries’ money in limbo. Kentucky law provides mechanisms to force…
Trusts concentrate enormous practical power in one person. A trustee holds legal title, writes the checks, picks the investments, and often controls what beneficiaries are told. The counterweight to all that power is the duty of loyalty — the strictest duty Kentucky law imposes on anyone. When a trustee starts treating trust assets as a…
For most Kentucky families, the single largest estate asset is real estate — the house, the farm, the rental property. Which means the single most damaging thing a careless or crooked executor can do is sell that property badly: below market, without exposure, on hurried terms, or to a buyer with connections to the executor….
In most Kentucky family estates, the executor is not a neutral professional — it’s the oldest child, the surviving spouse, or the sibling who lived closest to Mom. That person is usually also a beneficiary. Kentucky law permits this, and most of the time it works fine. But an executor-beneficiary wears two hats that pull…
The core promise a fiduciary makes is simple: this job is for their benefit, not mine. Self-dealing — an executor using the position to capture value from the estate for himself — is the most direct betrayal of that promise, and Kentucky courts treat it accordingly. If you are a beneficiary who has discovered that…