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Tyson E. Hubbard

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Tyson Hubbard is a partner at Downey Brand focusing on trust and estate litigation. He represents institutional and individual clients. For example, he represented University of the Pacific in a dispute in San Joaquin Superior Court involving John Muir’s papers.

Tyson, who grew up on a farm, enjoys helping family members navigate their fiduciary roles as trustees, which is usually an unfamiliar role and often a challenging one. He also advocates for family members who seek to obtain their fair shares as beneficiaries. Tyson works with clients to develop a strategy, and then he stays in close contact with them as he pursues it zealously. (Read more...)

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Deed TransferCalifornia’s new transfer on death deeds (“ToD deeds”) allow for the transfer of real estate upon the occurrence of death without the need for costly estate planning or probate administration. Codified at California Probate Code section 5600 – 5696, the new mechanism may fill a void in the array of estate planning options, but it is not likely to catch on with traditional estate planning attorneys for the reasons discussed below.

Fresno attorney Mark Poochigian presented a thoughtful and at times critical assessment of ToD Deeds at a Sacramento County Bar Association luncheon in June. At the Summer Education Conference of the California State Bar Trusts and Estate section, only one of the more than one hundred attorneys in attendance acknowledged having prepared one of these new deeds since the law went into effect on January 1, 2016.

Money TargetSpeak promptly or forever lose your rights. Creditor claims are an intricate area of California probate law that fills chapters in legal treatises. Fail to comply with the nuanced rules and you lose your claim against a decedent’s estate even if liability is otherwise rock solid. But what is a creditor claim and when is it required?

A creditor claim is a demand for payment that must be filed with the probate court and served on the personal representative (e.g., executor) of a decedent’s estate within a specified timeframe. Presentment of a creditor claim (and its rejection) is required before a lawsuit may be filed against the decedent’s estate. Moreover, if there is no pending probate case in the Superior Court, the creditor may have to take the initiative by opening a probate proceeding so as to create a case within which to present a claim.

Financial Audit

Sometimes stepmothers are just misunderstood.

Babbitt v. Superior Court (2016) 246 Cal.App.4th 1135, recently decided by the California Court of Appeal, involves one of the fact patterns that we often see in California trust litigation: children from a decedent’s prior marriage have conflict with their biological parent’s surviving spouse. In other words, after dad passes away, stepmom and the kids do not play nicely.

A Stack of PapersOnce your petition has been filed in the probate department of the Superior Court of California, and you are engaged in full-on “trust litigation,” what happens next? In most instances, it will be time to prepare for trial through a process called “discovery.” Discovery is the interval between when you file your petition and the date set for trial, when you are able to discover information that helps (or may hurt) your case.

California Probate Code section 1000 applies the Code of Civil Procedure to cases under the Probate Code, including the civil discovery tools. In general, these tools fall into four categories (1) Requests for Admissions; (2) Requests for Production of Documents; (3) Interrogatories; and (4) Depositions.

Double Damages_2xIn addition to bark, the Probate Code can have bite too. Some Probate Code sections have provisions that are punitive in nature and are designed to keep fiduciaries and others dealing with trust property in line. These statutes have sharp teeth.

Take, for example, California Probate Code section 859, which concerns property taken from a trust, an estate, a minor, an elder, or other vulnerable persons through the use of undue influence, in bad faith, or through the commission of financial elder abuse. This statute might be triggered if Junior tricked Mom into leaving him the $1.2 million family home in Granite Bay to the exclusion of Sister. In such an instance, section 859 permits the assessment of damages against the offending person in an amount double the value of the property that was taken, and allows for the court’s discretionary award of attorneys’ fees. This means that Sister might be able to recover $2.4 million against Junior along with the attorneys’ fees she spends pursuing him.

Neon Bar SignAt the Sacramento Estate Planning Council’s 2016 Technical Forum on Tuesday an elderly gentleman sitting next to me said “old accountants never die, they just lose their balance” and “old attorneys just lose their appeal(s).”  Sometimes both happen when an unbalanced accounting results in a lost appeal.  The California Court of Appeal issued a rare decision on January 6, 2016 concerning trust accountings, finding in Gray v. Jewish Federation of Palm Springs and Desert Area that Probate Code section 16373 allows a trustee to rob Peter to pay Paul (as long as Peter gets his money back eventually).

Trustee fees are common flash points in the administration of family trusts. Trustees may put in hundreds of hours cleaning out and selling the family home, dealing with accountants, lawyers, and realtors, and otherwise working to distribute assets out to the beneficiaries. A diligent trustee provides a valuable service and should be compensated for his or her time.

From the beneficiary’s perspective, however, it may come as a surprise that Junior has obtained a handsome trustee fee by writing a check to himself. The beneficiary may feel that Junior should act as a volunteer and/or may believe that Junior has acted improperly in trust administration such that he deserves no fee.

The California Court of Appeal blocked Donald Sterling’s last second shot at undoing the sale of the Los Angeles Clippers. Donald sought to overturn the results of an eight day trial that occurred in July 2014. The opinion, issued on November 16, 2015, should be of interest to settlors, trustees, and beneficiaries of “ordinary” trusts in California that do not hold a $2 billion NBA franchise.

The Court of Appeal hammered Donald for procedural deficiencies with his appellate briefs before ruling against Donald on all three issues on appeal. The court held that: (1) Donald was properly removed as trustee on the basis of his incapacity; (2) the trial court appropriately allowed the sale of the Clippers despite the pending appeal; and (3) Donald’s effort to revoke his trust was ineffective to stop the sale of the Clippers.