A document was signed when it shouldn't have been. Money has moved that shouldn't have moved. The personal representative or trustee is making decisions that don't add up. By the time most people call us, they already know the answer to "is something wrong here?" — they're calling for an answer to "what do I do about it?"
A meaningful share of the firm's litigation work is trust litigation, not just probate. The two areas overlap heavily in Michigan, but they're governed by different statutes — the Estates and Protected Individuals Code on one side and the Michigan Trust Code on the other — and the procedures, deadlines, and burdens of proof are not identical. We handle both.
A will or trust can be set aside in Michigan when it was procured by undue influence, executed by someone lacking testamentary capacity, the product of fraud, or improperly executed under the statutory formalities. These are evidence-driven cases. They're won and lost on the medical records, the witnesses, the drafting attorney's notes, the financial-account records — and on getting to those before they disappear.
Trust contests follow many of the same principles, but the procedural posture is different. Trusts are typically administered without ongoing court supervision, which means a beneficiary challenging a trust amendment or restated trust document often has to bring the matter into court themselves. The Michigan Trust Code contains specific notice and limitations provisions that can shorten the time to object substantially. Whether you're challenging a document or defending one, the strategy is the same in shape: get to the contemporaneous evidence quickly, develop a coherent theory of what actually happened, and force the other side to respond to it on the record.
Michigan law presumes undue influence when a confidential or fiduciary relationship existed between the decedent or settlor and the person who benefited, that person had the opportunity to influence, and they did benefit. We see this most often when an isolated parent's caregiver, late-life partner, or one of several adult children ends up with a disproportionate share — or with all of it.
Proving undue influence is rarely about a smoking-gun document. It's about a pattern: medical records showing decline, banking records showing redirected funds, beneficiary changes that line up with hospitalizations, isolation from other family members, and a final document signed in circumstances that no one can quite explain.
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A person executing a will, a trust, or an amendment must understand the nature and extent of their property, the natural objects of their bounty, and the disposition they are making. The bar is not high — but it is a real bar, and the diagnosis of dementia, advanced Alzheimer's, or a major stroke does not by itself decide the question. What decides it is the contemporaneous record on the day of execution and the days surrounding it.
A fiduciary who refuses to communicate, fails to provide a proper accounting, commingles funds, makes self-interested transactions, or simply isn't doing the job can be removed by the probate court. The standard varies depending on whether the fiduciary is a personal representative, a trustee, a conservator, or a guardian — and the Michigan Trust Code provides its own removal grounds for trustees that aren't perfectly identical to the probate code grounds for personal representatives. The underlying question is the same: are they capable of administering the estate or trust in the beneficiaries' interest, or aren't they?
When a personal representative or trustee has lost or misappropriated assets, removal is only the first step. We pursue surcharge — a personal money judgment against the fiduciary — for the value of what was lost or wrongly taken, plus the costs of the proceeding where appropriate. In some cases we also pursue claims against the institutions or advisors who facilitated the breach.
Some disputes only arise in the trust context: whether a trust amendment was validly executed; whether the settlor had capacity to amend the trust late in life; whether the trustee is properly interpreting an ambiguous distribution standard; whether a discretionary distribution was an abuse of discretion; whether the trustee's investment decisions met the prudent investor standard. We handle these, both for trustees defending decisions and for beneficiaries challenging them.
Joint accounts opened weeks before death. Beneficiary designations changed in the hospital. Real estate transferred for "love and affection" to the wrong person. Cash withdrawals that no one can explain. The probate code, the Michigan Trust Code, and Michigan common-law fraud and conversion claims all give the estate or trust routes to recover assets that should have stayed in it. The right approach depends on where the asset went, who has it now, and what records exist of the transfer.
For probate and trust litigation, most engagements start with a complimentary 20-minute screening call. We'll ask you what's happened, what notices you've received, what documents you have, and what you're trying to accomplish. From that conversation we can almost always tell you three things: whether you appear to have a viable claim or defense, what the deadline picture looks like, and what next step we'd recommend.
For matters that are clearly substantive and ready for real legal analysis, the $500 in-depth consultation gives us time to actually review documents and lay out a path. The fee is credited toward your engagement if you retain the firm.
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