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Hi, this is Stewart Albertson with Albertson & Davidson and I want to talk to you about an issue that we are seeing more and more of and that has to do with statute of limitation. Statute of limitation being the time period that you’re allowed to bring a lawsuit, whether it’s in probate court or civil court.
What we’re seeing and this video may be more to the practicing attorneys out there, but it’s also something the beneficiaries will want to be aware of. We’re seeing people miss these statute of limitations in trust and will cases and we believe the reason for that is is because it’s a complex analysis to determine what particular statute of limitation applies at what particular time at what particular proceeding in a trust and will contest matter.
Let me give you an example from another area of law to show you why we’re having issues with the trust and estates statutes and we’re seeing those come up more often where people are making mistakes.
Let’s talk about personal injury. Personal injury is very simple. If somebody crashes into you in a car. If somebody punches you in the face, you have two years to bring a lawsuit against that person before the statute of limitation runs. In other words, you can do anything you want for up to two years, as long as you file your lawsuit before the end of two years. You can bring a personal injury action against the person who hurt you.
Well, let’s come back to trust and estate law now. It’s not that simple. There’s various statute of limits that apply at times. Let’s talk about the bright line statute of limitations pertaining to decedents. The general rule is that when someone dies, and everyone should know when someone dies, that’s pretty easy to ascertain. You have one year to make a claim against that person. But that year can be shortened to as little as 120 days, depending on the circumstances.
If a petition for probate goes out and you have a will that’s admitted into probate. Once that’s admitted into probate, now you have 120 days to file a claim against the decedent. To make matters worse, if you’re doing a certain type of claim against the decedent, you’re going to have what we call a creditor’s claim in the probate estate of the decedent and you’re going to have to file a lawsuit all before the end of the claim period running.
In other types of cases, you only have to file the creditor’s claim but you can file the lawsuit after a year. And so this becomes confusing to many lawyers as it may be to you now as I’m trying to explain it.
There’s also another complication where you have financial elder abuse claims. This is where someone has a done a wrongful taking against somebody that’s a dependent adult or somebody that’s older than 65 years of age in California. We don’t want people abusing our elders. We don’t want them taking their finances in a wrongful taking. So the statute allows us to sue somebody, the wrongdoer in that case, for up to four years after the wrongful taking. So we literally can have four years going by, and as long as we get the financial elder abuse case on file before the four years runs, chances are, we beat that statute of limitations. However, if you were given statutory notice under a trust, which gives you 120 days within which to file a trust contest, and you do not file that trust contest within 120 days, you may be precluded from filing a financial elder abuse claim even though it gives you four years.
One more thing to add and that would be what if the drafting attorney, the attorney that drafts the trust or will, what if they have made a mistake and they hurt you as an intended beneficiary of that estate plan. In that case, you have one year from date of notice that you knew you were harmed by the attorney’s drafting, to file a legal malpractice case against that attorney. If you don’t have notice and you discover it later, more than one year after the event took place, you may be able to argue you didn’t have actual knowledge or that you shouldn’t have known about the harm that took place, and you may be able to use a four year statute of limitations to sue the attorney for legal malpractice.
The whole point of this video is not for you to understand all of these varied statute of limitations, some as short as 120 days, some as a long as a year, some as long as four years, is to show you that there’s complexity in each one of these trust and estate cases, you need to have expert analysis of your case so that somebody can see what the facts and circumstances are and what statute of limitations are going to apply to your case moving forward.
If you miss a statute, chances are you’re going to be barred forever from bringing your claim forward. So even those these are complex, difficult to understand, it’s something at the very beginning of a case you have to spend the time to understand, make sure you’re not missing anything, especially on the shorter ones such as the 120 days, because that one comes and goes very quickly.
Hopefully I haven’t confused you too much. I’ve confused myself a little bit in going over all this. All I want to point out is, this is a complex areas, these statute of limitations in trust and estate matters, make sure you get somebody that’s qualified to explain them to you and you understand the time limits you have to bring your claim forward in either probate court or civil court.