Trust Litigation in Marin County

A dispute over a Marin County trust or estate is heard by the Superior Court of California, County of Marin. California's Probate Code governs these cases statewide. It sets the deadline to contest a trust and lets beneficiaries ask the court to compel an accounting. It also allows them to seek a trustee's removal or recover money lost through a breach of trust.

Most people facing a trust dispute in Marin County did not expect to be in court. The trouble often starts after a parent or relative has died. A sibling may now control the trust, or a late amendment may have changed who inherits. Sometimes months go by with no accounting and no answers about the house or the accounts. Some readers are on the other side: a trustee or executor accused of misconduct who wants to understand what the court can actually order. This page sets out where these disputes are heard in Marin County and which California rules decide them.

Where Marin County Trust Cases Are Filed

The Superior Court of California, County of Marin hears trust and probate disputes arising in the county. The court sits in San Rafael, the county seat. The court's official website, marin.courts.ca.gov, is the reliable source for current information about filing, hearings and court services. This page does not list addresses, departments or judges. Those details can change and should come from the court itself.

Marin County is its own jurisdiction. Its court is separate from the superior courts of Sonoma, Contra Costa and San Francisco counties. Which county's court hears a particular matter depends on the facts. Those facts generally include where the trust is administered or where a decedent was domiciled, meaning where the person who died legally lived. A family can be spread across the Bay Area and still find its dispute belonging in one county's court rather than another's.

The Marin County Bar Association, at marinbar.org, maintains a lawyer referral service for people looking for counsel.

Types of Trust Disputes Heard in Marin County

Trust litigation covers several distinct kinds of disputes. Each rests on a different part of the Probate Code. Seeing which one matches a situation is often the first step toward knowing what the court can do about it.

Trust contests. A trust contest challenges whether a trust or an amendment is valid. Common grounds include lack of capacity, meaning the settlor lacked the mental ability the law requires when signing. Undue influence is another common ground. Probate Code section 86 gives that term the meaning set out in the Welfare and Institutions Code. Fraud and forgery are also raised. The general route is described on this site's page on how to contest a trust.

Breach of fiduciary duty. A trustee is a fiduciary, someone legally bound to act for others. Under Probate Code section 16004(a), a trustee has a duty not to use or deal with trust property for the trustee's own profit or for any purpose unconnected with the trust. The trustee also may not take part in any transaction in which the trustee has an interest adverse to the beneficiary. Under section 16004(c), a transaction between the trustee and a beneficiary that gives the trustee an advantage is presumed to violate the trustee's duties. The presumption affects the burden of proof, so the trustee must justify the transaction. It does not apply to an agreement about hiring or paying the trustee. Self-dealing disputes often involve a family home, a business or investment accounts.

Petitions concerning the trust's internal affairs. Under Probate Code section 17200(a), a trustee or beneficiary generally may petition the court about the internal affairs of the trust or to determine whether a trust exists. The statute's list of internal-affairs proceedings is not exhaustive. It includes construing the trust's terms, settling accounts, instructing the trustee and compelling the trustee to act. This site's page on the Probate Code 17200 petition covers it in more depth. Under section 17206, the court may make any orders necessary or proper to dispose of the matters in the petition, including appointing a temporary trustee.

Petitions to compel information or an account. Section 17200(b)(7) lets a beneficiary ask the court to compel the trustee to provide information or an account. A petition to compel information is available if the trustee has not provided requested information within 60 days after the beneficiary's reasonable written request, and the beneficiary has not received it within the six months before the request. A petition to compel an account works the same way. The trustee must have failed to submit a requested account within 60 days after written request, and no account can have been made within the preceding six months.

Trustee removal. Under Probate Code section 15642(a), a trustee may be removed in three ways: as the trust instrument provides, by the court on its own motion, or on petition of a settlor, cotrustee or beneficiary under section 17200. The grounds section 15642(b) lists include:

• a breach of trust;
• insolvency or other unfitness to administer the trust;
• hostility or lack of cooperation among cotrustees that impairs administration;
• failing or declining to act;
• excessive compensation.

That list is not exhaustive. An executor or administrator of an estate, called a personal representative, may be removed for the causes Probate Code section 8502 lists, including wasting, embezzling, mismanaging or committing a fraud on the estate, or being about to do so. The section also covers wrongful neglect and other statutory causes.

Recovery of wrongfully taken property. Probate Code section 859 provides a remedy when property is taken from a trust or a decedent's estate. The court must first find that a person in bad faith wrongfully took, concealed or disposed of the property, or took it by undue influence in bad faith, or through elder or dependent adult financial abuse. Only after such a finding is the person liable for twice the value of the property recovered. The court may also, in its discretion, award reasonable attorney's fees and costs against that person. Neither the doubled amount nor fees follow automatically from filing a claim.

Trust Contest Deadlines Under California Law

The clock for most trust contests starts with a document, the trustee's notification. It does not start with the death itself. Probate Code section 16061.7(a) requires the trustee to serve this notification in certain events. These include when a revocable trust becomes irrevocable because a settlor has died, and whenever the trustee of an irrevocable trust changes. The statute lists other events as well.

Once a person has been served with the notification triggered by section 16061.7(a)(1), Probate Code section 16061.8 sets the deadline. That person cannot bring an action to contest the trust after whichever of these comes later:

• 120 days from the date the trustee's notification is served on them; or
• 60 days from the date a copy of the trust's terms is delivered to them, if delivery happens during that 120-day period.

So if a beneficiary asks for and receives the trust document late in the 120-day window, the deadline may extend. Not every trust challenge falls under this rule. The deadline is tied to service of the notification, and which branch applies depends on the dates and documents in a particular case. Readers sometimes come across a "five-year rule" for trusts. It is not a California trust contest deadline.

A breach-of-trust claim runs on a separate clock under Probate Code section 16460(a). Suppose the beneficiary received an interim or final account, or another written report, that adequately disclosed the claim. The claim is then barred unless a proceeding is started within three years after the beneficiary received that account or report. A report adequately discloses a claim if it gives enough information that the beneficiary knows of the claim or reasonably should have looked into it. If no account or report disclosed the claim, or none was received, the three years instead run from when the beneficiary discovered, or reasonably should have discovered, the subject of the claim.

A family still grieving can find these dates hard to keep in view. They are written into statute, though, and the court applies them as written.

Trustee Duties and What Beneficiaries Can Demand

Probate Code section 16060 requires a trustee to keep the beneficiaries reasonably informed of the trust and its administration. Section 16061 adds a duty to report on reasonable request. The trustee must give a beneficiary requested information about the trust's administration that is relevant to that beneficiary's interest, with limited exceptions.

The duty to account is narrower than many people assume. Under Probate Code section 16062, the trustee generally must account at least annually, at the termination of the trust and upon a change of trustee. That duty runs to each beneficiary to whom income or principal is required, or authorized in the trustee's discretion, to be currently distributed. A beneficiary who will inherit only later may not be owed an annual account. Some older trusts are also exempt. Section 16064 recognizes that a trust instrument, or a beneficiary in writing, may waive the account. Even then, the court may compel the trustee to account on a showing that a material breach of the trust has reasonably likely occurred.

When a trustee commits or threatens to commit a breach of trust, Probate Code section 16420(a) lets a beneficiary or cotrustee start a proceeding for any appropriate purpose on the statute's list:

• to compel the trustee to perform the trustee's duties;
• to enjoin, meaning stop, a breach;
• to compel redress by payment of money or otherwise;
• to appoint a receiver or temporary trustee;
• to remove the trustee;
• to set aside the trustee's acts;
• to reduce or deny the trustee's compensation;
• to impose an equitable lien or a constructive trust, a court order treating property as held for its rightful owner;
• to trace and recover wrongfully disposed property or its proceeds.

Some of these remedies are subject to protections for third parties who dealt with the trustee. Under section 16420(b), these remedies do not exclude any other appropriate remedy.

Surcharge is the term for making a trustee pay for a breach. Under Probate Code section 16440(a), a trustee who commits a breach of trust is chargeable with whichever of these is appropriate under the circumstances:

• the loss or depreciation in value resulting from the breach, with interest;
• any profit the trustee made through the breach, with interest;
• any profit the trust would have earned, if the lost profit resulted from the breach.

Under section 16440(b), the court has discretion to excuse a trustee, in whole or in part. It may do so if the trustee acted reasonably and in good faith under the circumstances as the trustee knew them, and excusing the trustee would be equitable. A surcharge is never automatic.

Compensation disputes have their own rules. If the trust instrument does not specify the trustee's pay, Probate Code section 15681 entitles the trustee to reasonable compensation under the circumstances. Under section 15686(b), a trustee may not charge an increased fee without first giving at least 60 days' written notice to three groups of beneficiaries:

• each beneficiary entitled to an account;
• each beneficiary who was given the last preceding account;
• each beneficiary who asked in writing for notice of fee increases and gave an address.

If a beneficiary files a section 17200 petition to review the increase or remove the trustee, and serves it before the 60 days expire, the increase is generally held back. It stays on hold until the court orders otherwise or the petition is dismissed.

Undue Influence and the Presumption Under Probate Code Section 21380

Probate Code section 21380(a) creates a presumption, a legal starting assumption, for gifts to certain people. A provision making a donative transfer to one of these people is presumed to be the product of fraud or undue influence:

• the person who drafted the instrument;
• a person in a fiduciary relationship with the transferor who transcribed the instrument or caused it to be transcribed;
• a care custodian of a dependent adult transferor, but only if the instrument was executed while the care custodian provided services, or within 90 days before or after that period.

A donative transfer is a gift, including one made at death through a trust or will. The presumption does not reach every gift to a caregiver, relative or helper. It applies only to the people the statute describes, under the conditions it sets.

The presumption shifts the burden of proof. The beneficiary who received the gift may rebut it with clear and convincing evidence, which is a higher standard than ordinary civil proof. For a transfer to the drafter, and to certain people the statute associates with the drafter, the presumption is conclusive and cannot be rebutted. A beneficiary who tries and fails to rebut the presumption bears all costs of the proceeding, including reasonable attorney's fees.

Disputes over a late-life amendment favoring a caregiver or helper can feel deeply personal on every side. The statute frames the question around specific roles and dates rather than motives. Those are the facts the court will examine.

No-Contest Clauses in Marin County Trust Disputes

Many trusts include a no-contest clause, a provision meant to cut off a beneficiary who challenges the document. Under Probate Code section 21311(a), such a clause can be enforced only against three types of contests:

• a direct contest brought without probable cause;
• a pleading challenging a transfer of property on the ground that it was not the transferor's property, but only if the clause expressly says so;
• the filing of a creditor's claim or an action on it, again only if the clause expressly says so.

Section 21311(b) defines probable cause. It exists if, at the time the contest is filed, the facts known to the contestant would cause a reasonable person to believe there is a reasonable likelihood the relief requested will be granted after an opportunity for further investigation or discovery. A no-contest clause does not automatically disinherit everyone who challenges a trust or will.

Two questions turn on the exact wording of the instrument and the facts known at filing. The first is whether a planned challenge counts as a "direct contest." The second is whether probable cause supports it. These are legal questions an attorney can work through with the document in hand.

Finding Legal Help for a Trust Dispute in Marin County

Other resources exist. The Marin County Bar Association's lawyer referral service is available at marinbar.org. The State Bar of California's attorney search at calbar.ca.gov lets anyone check whether a lawyer is licensed. It also shows whether a lawyer holds a certified specialist designation in estate planning, trust and probate law. Every community in the county is served by the same Superior Court in San Rafael and the same Probate Code. The overview of California trust litigation on this site covers those statewide rules together.

This page does not address setting up a trust, drafting a will or handling an estate where no one disagrees.

Discussing a Trust or Probate Dispute in Marin County

A Marin County trust dispute usually turns on a handful of documents and dates. These include the trust and any amendments, and the date a trustee's notification was served. Accounts or reports received, the record of written requests for information, and the transactions involving trust property also matter. An attorney who reviews those materials can say which deadline, petition and remedy fit the facts. For readers still unsure whether a dispute exists at all, the court's own resources at marin.courts.ca.gov may be a useful place to begin.

To describe your situation and ask to speak with an attorney, you can request a consultation about your dispute through California Trust Litigation Lawyers.