Practice area
Trust Litigation
Protecting your family’s legacy requires swift, decisive action when trust disputes arise.
Our dedicated trust litigation team represents trustees, beneficiaries, and heirs navigating complex fiduciary conflicts. Our firm handles all aspects of trust litigation, including challenges to the enforceability of trusts, allegations of mismanagement of trust assets, demands for a full and complete accounting of trust assets, and disbursements of trust property to beneficiaries. The firm is equipped to defend trustees against contests to trust instruments on the grounds of undue influence, lack of testamentary capacity, fraud, or lack of compliance with proper will formalities. We aid trustees to avoid the pitfalls of trust administration and to defend against claims for breach of fiduciary duty, failure to report or account to beneficiaries, violation of prudent investor acts, theft, trustee removal actions, and related conflicts involved in complex family and business structures. We relish in protecting family and business assets and your legacies.
We handle high-stakes cases involving claims of undue influence, lack of mental capacity, asset mismanagement, and breaches of fiduciary duty. Whether you need to challenge an invalid trust amendment or defend your actions as a trustee, we provide the aggressive advocacy and deep legal expertise necessary to protect your financial interests.
We understand that trust disputes are deeply personal and frequently disrupt family harmony. Our priority is to resolve these sensitive conflicts efficiently, minimizing both emotional strain and costly litigation through skilled negotiation or trial. We carefully analyze every financial record, estate document, and account history to build an unassailable case for our clients. Partner with us to secure a clear, legally sound resolution that honors the true intent of the trust creator and safeguards your future.
What we handle
Trustee Representation
Serving as trustee makes you a target. Beneficiaries who disagree with a distribution, question an investment, or simply distrust a sibling can put your every decision under a microscope — and the standard you are held to under Utah law is exacting. We defend trustees and successor trustees against claims of mismanagement, self-dealing, and failure to account, and we advise before a dispute hardens into litigation. Often the strongest defence is the record you build now: clean accountings, documented reasoning, timely communication. Where a trust has become unadministrable, we petition the court for instructions so you are acting under an order rather than at your own risk.
Beneficiary Representation
If you are a beneficiary, the trustee controls the information, the money, and the timetable — and that imbalance is exactly what makes these disputes so frustrating. You are entitled to know what the trust holds, what has been paid out, and why. We represent beneficiaries and heirs who cannot get straight answers, whose distributions have stalled, or who suspect assets have been used for someone else’s benefit. We compel accountings, examine the financial record, and where the facts support it, seek the trustee’s removal and the return of what was lost. Most matters resolve once a trustee understands the scrutiny is real.
Trust Real Estate Disputes
Real property is where trust disputes turn hardest. A family home, a ranch, a rental portfolio — these are illiquid, emotionally loaded, and often the largest asset in the trust. Disagreements follow: whether to sell or hold, what a fair price is, who may occupy the property meanwhile, and how sale proceeds are divided. We act for trustees managing and liquidating trust property and for beneficiaries who believe a sale was below market or arranged to favour an insider. Because we litigate both trust and real estate matters, title, valuation, and fiduciary questions are handled together rather than referred out.
Trust Asset Accounting & Administration
An accounting is the beneficiary’s most powerful tool, and the trustee’s best protection. It sets out what the trust held, what came in, what went out, and what remains. When a trustee will not provide one, or provides something too vague to test, we petition the court to compel a full and complete accounting. We then examine it properly — tracing transfers, testing valuations, and identifying payments that served the trustee rather than the trust. For trustees, we prepare accountings that withstand that same scrutiny, which is very often what ends a dispute before it becomes a lawsuit.
Trust Contests & Disputes
Not every trust document reflects what its creator actually wanted. Amendments signed in the last weeks of life, a new beneficiary who appeared late, formalities that were never properly observed — each can be grounds to challenge the instrument. We bring and defend trust contests on grounds including undue influence, lack of capacity, fraud, and failure to comply with the requirements Utah law imposes. These cases are won on evidence: medical records, drafting attorney files, financial patterns, and witnesses to how the document came about. We gather that record early, because it becomes harder to reconstruct as time passes.
Breaches of Fiduciary Duties
A trustee owes duties of loyalty, impartiality, prudence, and disclosure. Breaching them has consequences — personal liability among them. We litigate claims involving self-dealing, commingled funds, imprudent or undiversified investments, unequal treatment of beneficiaries, undisclosed transactions, and outright conversion of trust property. We pursue removal of the fiduciary, surcharge to restore what the trust lost, and recovery of fees where the conduct warrants it. We also defend fiduciaries against claims that mistake an unpopular decision for a breach, which is a genuinely common accusation when a trustee is also a family member.
Tell us your story, and we’ll protect your inheritance
Tell us what has happened. We will tell you plainly whether there is something worth pursuing, and what it would take.