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The Georgia Court of Appeals handed down the case of In re Mahmoodzadeh on Monday, clarifying that a petition for year's support cannot be challenged in probate court on the basis of the validity of the title to property to be set aside.
In Georgia, a surviving spouse has the right to a certain amount of property from the estate of a decedent. How much that amount should be is a question for the courts. But as a practical matter, the courts only examine the amount when an objection is filed to the year's support petition. In Mahmoodzadeh, an objection was filed with the trial court, but it was an exotic objection, challenging not the amount of support to be awarded but the question of whether the deceased even had title to the property to be granted the petitioner. The trial court initially stated that this latter question was outside of its jurisdiction but seems to have reversed course. Its solution was to construe the objection as one regarding the AMOUNT of year's support, not the title to the underlying property. On that basis, and based upon a lack of evidence on the petitioner's side, the petition was denied fully. The Court of Appeals reversed. The trial court, it said, did not have jurisdiction to resolve conflicting claims to title to property, and in any event, the original objection never contested the amount of year's support. Therefore, the petitioner shouldn't have been required to establish this amount. Full text of the case is below the "read more" break. ------- Tanner Pittman, LLC regularly advises clients and assists with petitions for year's support, year's support litigation, and other probate and estate matters.
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 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. ----------- Tanner Pittman, LLC is a Georgia law firm that handles probate and administration of complex estates.  Governor Deal 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. ----- 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. ----- 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.
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AuthorTanner Pittman, LLC is a West Georgia law firm that specializes in estate services, civil litigation, and legal transactions. Archives
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