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Sean McKissick

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Sean McKissick provides strong and effective legal assistance throughout all stages of trust and estate disputes. Sean has extensive experience across a wide variety of litigation areas and industries in addition to trust and estate work, including healthcare, real estate, civil rights, and white-collar criminal defense. (Read more...)

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We’ve been your dogged reporter on the ever-growing logjam in the Courts of Appeal on trust modification procedure. We’ve followed the twists and turns that courts have taken as they’ve tackled the question of what happens when a trust amendment complies with statutory amendment requirements, but fails to follow the trust’s own specified amendment procedure. We’ve zigged with Pena v. Dey, zagged with Haggerty v. Thornton, and zigged right back again with Balistreri v. Balistreri.

The California Supreme Court is poised to provide a definitive answer. It granted review in Haggerty v. Thornton and the case was fully briefed as of July 20, 2022. Hence, it seemed that the Courts of Appeal might sit on any new cases dealing with the issue and await the Supreme Court’s decision.

Spoiler alert: they didn’t.

This blog has devoted a lot of real estate to the use of anti-SLAPP motions in California trust and estate litigation. Though the courts’ treatment of such motions is varied and oftentimes unpredictable, Californians can generally rely on the anti-SLAPP statute to strike any meritless cause of action that seeks to hold them liable for engaging in constitutionally protected activity. Traditionally, this has meant absolute protection for the pursuit of litigation, and specifically for funding litigation.

But for trustees, the Court of Appeal’s recent decision in Starr v. Ashbrook (2023) 87 Cal.App.5th 999 means that such protection may not be quite so absolute after all. It turns out that there is a fine line between “engaging in constitutionally protected activity” and “wasting and mismanaging trust assets.”

Operators of skilled nursing facilities want their patients to enter into arbitration agreements.  While such agreements don’t eliminate the risk of litigation, they at least reduce the expense and exposure associated with potential jury trials.

California appellate courts, however, have taken an ever narrower view of who can sign arbitration agreements on behalf of patients.  Just…

Another day, another decision by the California Court of Appeal making it more difficult for residential care facilities for the elderly (“RCFEs”) to enforce their arbitration agreements.

Upon admission to virtually any RCFE, a new resident will be asked to sign a stack of documents including an agreement to submit any future dispute to arbitration. …

Recent decisions by the California Court of Appeal have heaped stress on the owners/operators of residential care facilities for the elderly (“RCFEs”).

RCFEs, like other businesses, would prefer to avoid the court system and jury trials by obtaining residents’ consent to the arbitration of any disputes that might arise. But as California appellate courts are…

Suing the suer is a common strategy in California civil litigation. A special motion to strike, known as an anti-SLAPP motion, can be a powerful weapon against retaliatory litigation.  We have explained the use of such motions in trust and estate disputes. More specifically, we have explored their application to petitions to enforce no contest…

There’s a saying amongst attorneys that “bad facts make bad law.”  By extension, “really bad facts” can throw probate procedure into flux by making it harder to qualify for an evidentiary hearing.  That’s arguably what happened in Conservatorship of Farrant (2021) 67 Cal.App.5th 370, a decision issued this month by the California Court…

Section 2030 of California’s Family Code provides an important safeguard to ensure the fairness of marriage dissolution proceedings. It allows the Court to order a more financially well-off party to pay some or all of the other party’s attorney fees, beginning as early as the start of the proceedings. Section 2030 was enacted to put…