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.

The Supreme Court of Georgia clarified the visitation rights of grandparents to visit their grandchildren in a ruling on January 9, 2012. 

The ruling is not so interesting for what it does address (touching on the technical niceties of family situations involving an adoptive step-parent) as the point of law it stands for: that grandparents have no de jure rights to visit their grandchildren if the children's parents are married to one another.

This point of law sometimes relates to estate planning issues, as estate and probate attorneys find they feel like practitioners of "domestic" law far too often. Family rifts wind up in wills and blow up in probate. 

The relevant statute, O.C.G.A. § 19-7-3, is below in its entirety for the reader's reference, as is the Supreme Court opinion. Click the "read more" link to find them.

Tanner Pittman, LLC is an estate planning and probate law firm that regularly advises clients on planning around difficult family situations. Feel free to contact us today about your own such issues.  

The very fact that we're in a historically unprecedented time of Congressional generosity may be lulling the wealthy in to a false sense of security, reports Investment News.

Faced with a $5 million exemption and other priorities in life, individuals of all but the most tremendous wealth are putting off complicated tax planning in particular, and estate planning in general, according to a survey of 1,085 estate planning professionals. 

But we live in uncertain times. The estate tax exemption is set to go down to $1 million for each individual beginning in 2013, provided Congress does nothing. Why not wait until then? The very fact of this uncertainty, argue planners (this one included) means the time is nigh to make a contingency plan. After all, life happens, and given the large number of wealthy in their later years, many individuals run the risk of an event that will cause their incapacity before they can react to an adverse move by Congress.

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. 

Most wills contain standard language requiring executors to pay charitable pledges "whether enforceable or not" out of the estate before any amounts are paid to heirs. 

In August of last year, the Rev. Markel Hutchins strained the "enforceable or not" language farther than it was ever intended to go by suing the estate of Kathryn Johnson, the 92-year-old notoriously shot to death by police return-fire in a mistaken drug raid. 

Johnson's estate famously won a settlement against the City of Atlanta in the amount of $4.9 million for, among other things, her wrongful death in the raid.

Hutchins is suing for $490,000, which represents a "tithe" from the $4.9 million estate, reports AtLaw. The tithe is owed him, Hutchins has said in pleadings because of his role as "principal strategist and issue manager; public relations expert; crisis intervention and crisis management expert; investigator; project manager; government relations expert; and other duties as requested by the Defendants and those acting in concert with them."

The case is presently before the Georgia Court of Appeals on interlocutory appeal from an early trial court ruling.  

Connecticut elder law attorney Michael Keenan blogs here about the importance of not violating the "sole benefit" rule in a special needs trust. I would add only a resounding "amen." 

When funds in a special needs trust are misused, the result may be that the intent of the entire trust is defeated, which can be disastrous for the beneficiary. 

And "misuse" of trust funds need not be something nefarious. As Keenan notes, if a minor child receives a distribution that should have been the responsibility of the parents, then the trust has been misused. The government may take the position that the distribution was a "gift" to the parents rather than the child. 

Tanner Pittman, LLC advises clients on estate planning issues, including special needs trusts.  

The most common issue brought up in probate litigation is that of executor fraud and breach of fiduciary duty. Though difficult to prove, it is nevertheless alarmingly common. Executors of an estate sometimes deal with estate property as though it belonged to them, can "compensate" themselves handsomely for executor's services, and with surprising frequency favor one heir over others. 

In re Estate of Tarpley was previously up before our Court of Appeals and was blogged about by this firm here. 

The case involved an executor that treated the decedent's truck as though it were her own and wound up liable for high compensatory damages, punitive damages, and attorney fees. 

The recent opinion, reprinted in whole after the "read more" break below, deals primarily with procedural issues surrounding the award of damages, but the underlying message is clear: executors can be taken to task for their misappropriation of estate property. 

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. 

Your Facebook account. A lifetime of personal emails. All your bank passwords. 

These are all things that your will won't pass on to your heirs. And chances are high that they'll be lost forever. 

That's quite a loss when you consider it. Today, our personal email accounts are like an intimate journal of our lives and include correspondence with loved ones, cherished photographs, and important information that should be could be passed on to future generations. 

This is to say nothing of the financial mess that we all have online. The average person has literally dozens of passwords to online accounts, none of which survive his death. 

Planning is the answer to all this.

This firm yearly encourages clients to keep digital and hard-copy lists of email accounts, financial passwords, and other such information securely in the hands of a trusted loved one. 

A recent Seattle Times article provides even more insight. The estate planning attorney quoted therein, James Lamm, says that a "digital will" has three basic steps: 

"First, do a complete inventory of all digital accounts and assets so that your estate administrator will know just what you have of potential value (or liability) and where it is. Second, assemble a list of all passwords. Third, select a fiduciary and give them the proper power of attorney to administer your estate."

Another note: It is possible to access the gmail, yahoo, or hotmail accounts of a deceased individual. This blog explains how. See also here for another step-by-step guide to preparing your "digital will." 


Tanner Pittman, LLC is an estate planning and probate law firm that regularly advises clients on such matters as digital wills. 

This firm is clearly not tackling avant guarde issues in probate litigation, as demonstrated by this article in the Chicago Tribune. According to the story, a man died when struck by an express Amtrak train in 2008. Unfortunately a piece of his body also struck another woman during the accident. 

The woman hit by his flying body parts is now suing the dead man's estate. 

And apparently, she has a case. The Illinois Court of Appeals recently overturned the trial court opinion dismissing the suit. The injuries the plaintiff suffered were, according to the appellate court, a reasonably foreseeable result of the dead defendant's actions. 

The ABA has published a quick write-up of the story here.