Successor Trustees

David: Hello everyone, I’m David Shulman of the firm Ginsburg Shulman. I’m here with my partner, Jill Ginsburg, and we’re an estate planning, probate, guardianship, and trust administration law firm. And speaking of trust administration, that’s what we’ll be speaking about in this video. Jill, so we’ve spoken about what a revocable trust is in the past, but briefly, what is a revocable trust and how is it different from a will?

Jill: A revocable trust is an entity where you can pass your assets on to your heirs and beneficiaries without generally having to go through the court, or probate as it’s called here in Florida. And a will is another document that allows you to leave items, when you die to your beneficiaries, but unfortunately in Florida a will goes through the court and goes through a process called probate, which is the process of transferring your assets to your beneficiaries.

So a person creates a revocable trust. They’re generally called the settler or [00:01:00] the grantor. So what, they create the trust, they transfer their assets to it. Then what happens when the settlor dies? When the settlor dies, that trust now becomes irrevocable. So during the lifetime, the grantor settler can revoke it and do what they want.

Obviously, once they’re no longer around, they can’t really revoke it. So at that point, it becomes irrevocable. And at that point, a new trustee A successor trustee, as they’re called, will step in and will administer the trust.

David: So someone dies, there’s a new successor trustee, what are the first things a successor trustee should do specifically regarding the settler’s accounts?

There’s the bank account, their brokerage accounts, all these accounts that were owned by the trust. What’s the successor trustees, what’s one of the first things they should do?

Jill: The successor trustee, one of the first things they’re going to do is obviously they’re going to do documentations for the trust, which they’re going to need a lawyer for, but now they’re going to have to go to all the accounts and try and explain to [00:02:00] all of these banks how they’re the new successor trustee.

And I don’t know if you’ve ever dealt with a bank before, but good luck to that. Very difficult and it makes life very difficult and very hard for the trustees who spent a lot of time with different trust officers and different legal departments. And that’s where hopefully you and I come in, David, where an attorney can really make life much easier for a successor trustee by handling the legal departments and handling a lot of the legal issues.

David: So great. So someone comes to you. Well, first of all, let’s say someone comes to you with a trust that we didn’t draft and they say, you know, I’m appointed successor trustee of this trust. Your firm didn’t draft it. Can you help me? Can we help them?

Jill: Of course we can help them. I mean, luckily in the state of Florida, you’re not tied to any one attorney.

You know, a lot of attorneys keep copies of, keep the originals, not even copies of wills and trusts. David, you and I don’t do that. We don’t think it’s appropriate. It’s not not appropriate, but we just don’t think it’s a good idea. But if [00:03:00] somebody comes to us and we didn’t draft it and they want us to administer it, generally we’re happy to do that.

It depends on how it’s drafted, but I would say for the most part, we’d be happy to help administer it.

David: And in general, what do we as attorneys do to help people, to help successor trustees through the process of administering the trust?

Jill: Well, you know, we have our own checklist that we’ve made up from the years that we’ve been doing this, and we also guide them through the process.

What a lot of successors don’t understand is there’s Florida statutes that they have to follow. There’s timelines, deadlines, and very strict deadlines, especially with regards to documents that have to be sent to the beneficiaries. And these are all things that you and I could help them with, you know, especially legal issues and all other things.

You know, related issues to that, or things that a lawyer can help guide you through and make the process a lot easier.

David: Right. Well, thank you, Jill. I think this is a good introduction to Successor Trustees, and we’ll see you all in the next video. Thanks a lot.