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Who’s your father for inheritance purposes in California? Family Code section 7540(a) states that “the child of spouses who cohabited at the time of conception and birth is conclusively presumed to be a child of the marriage.” A child covered by this marital presumption is not an heir of a deceased third person even if genetic testing proves a parent-child relationship.

In Estate of Franco (2023) 87 Cal.App.5th 1270, the Court of Appeal clarified that, in order for the marital presumption to be applied, there must be a clear showing of cohabitation (living together) at the time of conception and birth.…

Here’s another reason (uno más in Spanish) to create and properly execute a will. If your spouse or other trusted designee lives out of the country when you die, he or she won’t be eligible to administer your California estate. The recent case of Estate of El Wardani (2022) 82 Cal.App.5th 870, involving…

Traditionally, the creation of a valid will, in California and elsewhere, required strict adherence to certain formalities.  Estate law has been tepidly moving away from requiring compliance with those formalities, with a goal of prioritizing the intent of the person creating the will (the “Testator”).  Nine states have gone so far as to enact laws…

When an administrator (or executor) of a California estate is named in a judgment, the attorney drafting the judgment must be careful.  A person who acts in a representative capacity should be identified that way in the judgment – otherwise, the attorney may have to pursue a costly fix.

A recent probate case from San…

We “ring” in 2022 with a recent case that again shows the long reach of statutory financial elder abuse claims in California trust and estate litigation. In Ring v. Harmon (2021) ___ Cal.App.5th ___, the Court of Appeal considered an alleged loan scheme to drain equity out of a house held in a probate…

Can a California will sever a joint tenancy such that the decedent’s interest in real property passes per will’s terms instead of vesting in the surviving joint tenant(s)? Additionally, when a general partnership dissolves after the death of a partner’s spouse, does the deceased spouse’s estate have a community property interest in the distributed partnership assets?…

Even a court order approving an accounting may not protect a California fiduciary if the accounting is inaccurate. That’s the upshot of Hudson v. Foster (2021) 68 Cal.App.5th 640, a recent California Court of Appeal decision involving a conservatorship.

The conservatee in this case consented to the conservator’s account and four years passed before…

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…

Many California trusts confer a lifetime right to income on a person (often the surviving spouse) with the remainder passing to designated survivors upon the income beneficiary’s death.  When the income beneficiary dies, is it too late for the executor of the beneficiary’s estate to request an accounting for the purpose of evaluating whether the…

One of the first steps before filing a lawsuit is to decide which court has jurisdiction over it and where it is properly venued.  It’s a significant choice – not only for strategic reasons, but also because a poor selection may prove fatal to the lawsuit.  Such a hefty decision is not always an easy…