Unlike Michael Jackson's, the Huffington Post reports, the Whitney Houston estate will not make much money from the bump her singles will inevitably get in radio play and record sales due to her untimely death. 

But Dolly Parton will. 

Parton was the writer of the popular Houston single, "I Will Always Love You," and as such commands a much larger share of the song's royalties than its singer, whose cut, according to the HP article, is diluted severely by, among other things, recording and promotion costs. 

Because Houston never actually wrote her songs, most of her income streams would have been in the form of fees for tours and appearances, which of course cannot now continue. 

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Tanner Pittman, LLC is a Georgia law firm that handles probate and administration of complex estates.  

HB 683 was signed into law this week by Georgia Governor Nathan Deal. The law allows banks, employers, and other non-lawyers to file answers to summonses of garnishment in any Georgia court, whether or not represented by an attorney. The Georgia legal newspaper of record, the Daily Report, posted a write-up of the law here. 

Essentially, the law cuts against the basic notion that practicing in court without an attorney is engaging in the unauthorized practice of law. The reason is that banks and employers are organizations. In practice, they cannot "represent themselves" because they are not people. Paying an employee to represent the institution is essentially like hiring a lawyer without a bar license.

Attorney opinions are mixed on the question of whether this is a good development. On the one hand, responding to a summons of garnishment is fairly routine, and once a bank officer has done it, the procedure varies little in the second and succeeding iterations. 

On the other hand, the courts simply are the province of attorneys according to Georgia law. Carving out an exception for garnishment responses makes no sense when there is no exception for other, equally routine legal matters. A strictly libertarian answer to this inconsistency would be to allow anyone, for any reason, to represent a company, lawyer or no. And then we could leave it to lawyers to prove their worth to potential corporate clients. 

As this firm practices frequently on behalf of creditors in collections matters, we can say from experience that allowing non-lawyers to practice before courts, at the very least, will increase the rate of error and resultant burden on society in the form of court time and backlogs.

Congress has been mulling over allowing the "stretch IRA" benefit to lapse. At present, when you inherit a properly titled IRA, you can continue to allow it to grow tax-deferred, taking only certain required minimum distributions over your lifetime. 

That may be all about to change if Congress repeals this lenient rule in the latest transportation bill. 

All of which, says estate planner Ronald Morton, should make Roth IRA's even more attractive as savings vehicles. Since Roths are paid into with after-tax earnings, they trigger no tax hit when distributions are made, as they would be when the Roth is received as part of an inheritance. 

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Tanner Pittman, LLC is a LaGrange, Georgia, and Metro Atlanta estate planning law firm that advises clients on structuring their retirement assets for inheritance purposes. 

John Goodman, the Florida millionaire,  has notoriously adopted his girlfriend, who is only six years his junior. 

Trial and heirs blog has a very interesting analysis of the matter here. As the authors explain it, a primary reason for the adoption is that Goodman's irrevocable trust for his children needed tending to. 

It seems the trustee of the trust, in Goodman's view, was not managing it well on behalf of his teenage children. And since the trust was irrevocable, Goodman himself could not do anything to change the trustee. 

Enter his girlfriend. Goodman's plan appears to have been to make her his legal "child," thus giving her the right to more closely monitor the behavior of the trustee from the standpoint of a beneficiary of the trust. 

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Tanner Pittman, LLC is a LaGrange, Georgia, and metro Atlanta law firm that advises clients on estate planning matters, including irrevocable trusts 

Presently, when an IRA owner dies, the named beneficiary of the IRA may take distributions of that account over his or her actuarial lifetime. The benefit of this is that the principal of the IRA continues to grow tax-deferred, resulting in very significant lifetime gain. 

Estate planning attorney Ronald Morton fears this benefit may be marked for death by Congress. He cites to a recent Forbes article addressing the same concerns. 

Tanner Pittman, LLC is a West Georgia and Atlanta-area law firm specializing in estate planning and complex planning to avoid estate and gift taxation for affluent individuals and families.   

Estate planning firm the Tieger Law Center posts a synopsis of a Vending Times article on the top five ways to leave your estate to the IRS.  It's well worth a read.



Tanner Pittman, LLC is a West Georgia and Atlanta-area law firm specializing in estate planning and complex planning to avoid estate and gift taxation for affluent individuals and families.  

This law firm now operates and maintains the new website georgiayearssupport.com. Feel free to visit.

Tanner Pittman, LLC regularly advises clients and assists with petitions for year's support, year's support litigation, and other probate and estate matters.   

This firm recently published a guide for attorneys to the Georgia law of year's support for a continuing legal education event in Columbus, Georgia. 

The guide is intended for use by other attorneys and is fairly technical, but as I think it also may be useful to lay individuals petitioning for year's support, I am uploading it in its entirety here. 

We welcome comments and questions from readers about Georgia year's support law. 

  

Tanner Pittman, LLC regularly advises clients and assists with petitions for year's support, year's support litigation, and other probate and estate matters.  

The estate of Georgia singer James Brown, who died in 2006, has been plagued by trouble almost even before the testator's death. 

Recently, reported Forbes magazine, owing to court disputes and problems getting income streams from estate assets, the estate faced some $20 million in debt as against $14,000 in cash and other holdings. 

The Augusta Chronicle reported, furthermore, in January that an irrevocable trust established by Brown to benefit children's charities has been fleeced at least to the tune of $373,000 by  its former trustee, David Cannon. 

Presently, Cannon is battling a contempt charge in the South Carolina Supreme Court for failure to pay restitution of this amount, plus attorney fees and penalties. 

Working against Cannon in his efforts to argue the fees and fine are excessive is the fact that he owns a $1 million home in Honduras purchased, in large part it would seem, with funds from the Brown trust.  

Tanner Pittman, LLC is an estate planning and probate law firm that assists clients in pursuing cases of breach of fiduciary duty against executors and trustees in estates.  

The Georgia Supreme Court Monday handed down the case of Mason v. Phillips, which overturned the will of Frances E. Hobbs, which had left all of her property to her husband. 

Why? Because the will had been written in 1974 and not probated until 2005. Wills written prior to 1988 in Georgia were witnessed by three individuals but had no provision for a self-proving affidavit. 

That affidavit, which is now part of any well drafted will, allows testators to avoid the consequences in Mason v. Phillips. In that case, probating the nearly forty-year-old will required testimony from all the witnesses that they recalled witnessing the will and that those were indeed their signatures upon it. 

The case goes into further detail, (read more of the case here or by clicking the "read more" link below) but the upshot was that no witness could recall signing, and the one witness that could be found specifically said that he didn't remember the signing. 

Accordingly, an otherwise perfectly valid will was overturned. And this is the fate that presently awaits untold numbers of pre-1988 wills in Georgia. 

Fortunately, there is a fix: it is a simple thing for pre-1988 testators to amend their wills and have a self-proving affidavit added as a codicil, thus avoiding the need to, for example, develop forensic handwriting investigation testimony about long-dead witnesses.