In its recent Rotert v. Stiles opinion, the Indiana Supreme Court honored established principles of statutory interpretation and judicial restraint in deciding that Indiana’s trust code does not prohibit restraints on marriage.
Indiana Supreme Court justices reversed Friday in a dispute between two siblings over a provision in their late mother’s trust regarding her son, holding the provision was not an unlawful restraint on marriage.
Indiana Supreme Court justices have granted transfer in a case involving a sibling dispute over their late mother’s trust.
Two grandparents, including an Indiana woman, have been indicted for allegedly stealing insurance funds from trust accounts they created for the benefit of their 8-year-old granddaughter after their son’s death.
The case involved the amount of damages Sydney Renner was entitled to after a 2016 accident that left her with a concussion.
An order for a brother to pay nearly $245,000, including more than $100,000 in attorney fees, in a dispute with his siblings over a breach of their mother’s revocable trust was affirmed Friday by the Indiana Court of Appeals.
An Indianapolis attorney and real estate broker whose overdrafts of his attorney trust accounts triggered a disciplinary commission investigation received a suspended suspension Thursday subject to at least one year of probation with accountant monitoring.
The wife and personal representative of a man who died in 2018 must provide more than $351,000 she cashed from an account that a trial court ruled belonged to the deceased’s daughter, the Indiana Court of Appeals affirmed Monday.
A split appellate panel reversed in a trust dispute between siblings on Monday, concluding that the language in their mother’s trust regarding her son was ultimately a restraint on marriage and therefore void.
Currently, assets in an Indiana legacy trust must vest within 90 years, covering a few generations of heirs. But a proposal before the Probate Code Study Commission would quadruple that time to 360 years, allowing for the creation of Hoosier “dynasty trusts” for the first time.
Under the Indiana Dead Man’s Statute, the deceased can tell no tales, but a recent decision by the state’s Court of Appeals has created uncertainty over when the survivors can speak, particularly where it concerns trusts.
A helpful tool to simplify complex scenarios for clients is the use of visual aids or flowcharts to demonstrate key portions of a will or trust. Particularly in a trust instrument, a diagram of how assets flow is often very helpful to clients and helps them understand things simply.
Prior to 2019, Hoosiers interested in creating a directed trust had to leave the state to do so. Now they do not, and Indiana banks and trust companies have a new product to offer customers and will be able to attract business from other states that still do not allow for directed trusts.
The Indiana Court of Appeals has reversed in part a verdict against a widow in a family dispute stemming from her diversion of $8 million of her late-husband’s trust assets that effectively disinherited his son.
An ex-Indiana judge whose former law office is accused of stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars from an estate he established that was meant to go to charity has been sanctioned — as has his defense attorney — after a judge ruled they made false statements and attempted to mislead the court in the charity’s civil lawsuit.
A woman who filed a legal malpractice claim in a matter that began more than 20 years ago failed to convince the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals that her complaint over the distribution of a trust was timely.
The Indiana Court of Appeals in an interlocutory appeal has affirmed for a brother in a sibling squabble over Southern Indiana real estate and property left by their mother after her death.
We return to the scenario presented in a previous article, “Premortem validation could help avert will, estate contests” (Indiana Lawyer, Oct. 16, 2019). Recall that the mother (“mom”) changed her will six months before her death, giving the entire estate to her caregiver-daughter (“daughter”) and leaving nothing for her out-of-town son (“son”). Since Indiana has not yet enacted pre-mortem validation statutes for wills or trusts, daughter and son must argue the validity of the final will in court after mom has passed. This article discusses how the scenario (and a similar one dealing with a revocable trust) might play out under current Indiana law.
We are almost halfway through 2020 and have seen the stock market fall, rally and fall again. We have been trapped in our houses unable to help our unstable economy, attempting to find new hobbies to pass the time and, of course, practicing social distancing. The silver lining to this pandemic is that it has provided an opportunity for us to better ourselves, and with falling interest rates, transfer our clients’ wealth to the next generation.
The coronavirus pandemic seems to be the push many people needed. Most clients, estate planning lawyers say, tend to put off preparing their documents, usually believing that they still have time. But with the continuance of the COVID-19 pandemic and the daily coverage of case counts and death tolls, attitudes have changed.