Homeowners' Associations ("HOAs") serve an important purpose in many California communities. Essentially, an HOA serves as a kind of municipal authority over many aspects of home ownership in the community in which it is established. HOAs derive their existence and...
It is proverbial in California that Homeowners Associations ("HOAs") have come to play an important part in home ownership. Whether you want to paint your house, remodel it, re-landscape your yard, and most other common scenarios of home ownership, chances are that...
Not infrequently, California trust litigation is caused by a poorly or carelessly drafted trust. Litigation can be costly, and trust litigation is a very good example whereby an ounce of prevention can be more valuable than the proverbial pound of cure. Our Firm...
Buffington Law Firm’s litigation attorneys often use mediation or other forms of alternative dispute resolution as an alternative to taking a case to trial. Statistically, in California it is said by some authorities that up to 97% of all civil lawsuits settle out of...
This is the second in a series of Blog posts in which Buffington Law Firm's trust litigation attorneys discuss certain estate planning scenarios that seem to frequently lead to trust disputes and trust litigation. This Blog post will discuss the situation in which,...
This is the first article in a series called "Avoiding Trust Litigation." Buffington Law Firm's trust litigation attorneys have litigated hundreds of trust litigation scenarios. There are certain estate planning practices that seem very prone to resulting in unhappy...
When trust litigation attorneys examine the factual and legal basis for whether grounds exist to contest a California Living Trust, usually the threshold issue concerns the mental status of the trustmaker ("trustor") when he or she created the instrument to be...
An increasingly common issue that Buffington Law Firm's trust litigation attorneys are having to deal with concerns the ownership of parents' bank accounts after the parents have passed away. The best practice is for bank accounts to be titled in the name of their...
As discussed in our Blog article last week, although California Living Trusts are intended to avoid Court involvement, once a trust petition activates such involvement, courts have broad equitable powers to issue orders to carry out the court's supervision of the...
No Contest Clauses are one of the most misunderstood aspects of California living trust litigation. Buffington Law Firm's trust litigation attorneys often deal with situations that involve a "No Contest Clause" and whether or not a given No Contest Clause is...