Webinar Transcript (5/28/2026): Designing Resilient Estate Plans: Planning to Avoid Litigation
Host: Jonathan I. Shenkman, President & Chief Investment Officer of ParkBridge Wealth Management (Contact: jonathan@parkbridgewealth.com)
Speaker:Asher Lowenstein, Esq., Founder, Lowenstein Legal PLLC (Contact: asher@lowensteinlegal.com)
Jonathan Shenkman: Good morning, and welcome to the Park Bridge Wealth Management Spring Webinar Series. This program is entitled, Designing Resilient Estate Plans, Planning to Avoid Litigation. As always, my name is Jonathan Shankman, I'm the President and Chief Investment Officer of Park Bridge Wealth Management.
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Jonathan Shenkman: In that role, I serve in a fiduciary capacity to help my clients achieve their financial objectives. The goal of my programs is to bring professionals together to help them better serve their clients. This is done by educating attendees on the latest topics in wealth planning, and by encouraging collaboration between a client's attorney, CPA, and financial advisor where appropriate.
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Jonathan Shenkman: My practice focuses on working with high net worth families, businesses, and not-for-profits. I manage individual investment portfolios, trust accounts, corporate retirement plans, and endowments to help my clients achieve their financial goals. In addition to the 20 or so events I run every year, I also do a fair amount of writing on the topics of investing and financial planning.
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Jonathan Shenkman: And you can read my work in a variety of periodicals, including Barron, CNBC, Forbes, Kiplinger, The Wall Street Journal, and Trust and Estates Magazine, to name just a few.
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Jonathan Shenkman: You can see all my work on my website at parkbridgewealth.com forward slash articles, or by following me on social media at Jonathan on Money.
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Jonathan Shenkman: Additionally, you could check out my weekly podcast, which is also called Jonathan on Money, and you can listen to that on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. And finally, I've published my first book, Deeds for Diversification, The ABCs of Personal Finance, which can now be purchased on Amazon or jonathanOnMoney.com. It's a great way to support these programs.
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Jonathan Shenkman: Today, we're privileged to hear from Asher Lomenstein.
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Jonathan Shenkman: Founder of Lowenstein Legal, PLLC, based in Long Island, New York. By way back, Garnasher is an estate planning attorney with nearly a decade of experience helping families navigate planning and dispute resolution. Known for his clarity and attention to detail, he explains complex issues in plain language and structures plans that prevent conflict and protect family goals. A Harvard Law graduate, he trained at Simpson Thatcher, clerked at Southern District of New York, and later worked at both International Boutique
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Jonathan Shenkman: firms handling sophisticated disputes. His background, combined with a client-centered approach, allows him to offer skilled, practical counsel attuned to the sensitive nature of family, legacy, and long-term planning. And today, Asher is going to be speaking on designing resilient estate plans, planning to avoid litigation, and with that introduction, I'll now turn the program over to Asher.
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Asher Lowenstein: Thank you so much, Jonathan, for that kind introduction. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining. My name is Asher Lowenstein. I want to thank Jonathan and
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Asher Lowenstein: Park Bridge Wealth Management for organizing this talk. My practices, as Jonathan mentioned, focuses on trusts and estates planning, but I also spend a significant portion of my time on litigation
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Asher Lowenstein: That follows when a plan fails.
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Asher Lowenstein: So that gives me a view of what goes wrong, and sometimes what can be done to prevent it. So over the next few minutes, I want to share
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Asher Lowenstein: Some of those things those failures have in common.
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Asher Lowenstein: And how strategic planning can really help to reduce the risk of litigation.
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Asher Lowenstein: So, this talk is organized in…
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Asher Lowenstein: 8 short sections. We're gonna start with the two doctrines that drive most contests.
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Asher Lowenstein: A will, whether it's a will or a trust contest, that's capacity and undue influence.
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Asher Lowenstein: From there, we'll move on to drafting distribution standards.
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Asher Lowenstein: Often language that seems clear at signing can produce, you know, long litigation.
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Asher Lowenstein: And then on to two structural problems, so these are blended families, business succession.
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Asher Lowenstein: Sometimes these are the plans, the structure itself that is in place creates the conflict.
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Asher Lowenstein: And then we'll close… Briefly, with valuation and trustee selection.
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Asher Lowenstein: Which are… seem as administrative decisions, but they're really also often at the heart of a dispute.
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Asher Lowenstein: I should just note that while I practice in New York and New Jersey, the considerations
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Asher Lowenstein: That we're going to be discussing apply generally across…
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Asher Lowenstein: across all jurisdictions in the United States, so that's why I drew cases from several states. The legal standards may be different in various respects, but the underlying concerns really are the same across the states.
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Asher Lowenstein: So, I want to start with the stakes.
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Asher Lowenstein: Of… in a state contest.
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Asher Lowenstein: Because often, doctrine alone does not move people.
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Asher Lowenstein: But there's so many examples to choose from, but let me just start with one.
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Asher Lowenstein: And that would be…
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Asher Lowenstein: James Brown, the godfather of soul, not because he's necessarily the best example, but it's just an illustration. So, he died on December 5th, 2006.
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Asher Lowenstein: His estate… Included a trust meant to fund scholarships for needy children.
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Asher Lowenstein: It was in litigation for nearly 15 years.
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Asher Lowenstein: It finally settled in July 2021.
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Asher Lowenstein: That's 15 years.
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Asher Lowenstein: Every year, the estate was drained by fees.
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Asher Lowenstein: Frozen distributions, and every year, the beneficiaries waited.
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Asher Lowenstein: That scholarship fund that he wanted so much.
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Asher Lowenstein: sat untouched while the lawyers argued about it in court, and every professional in his orbit
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Asher Lowenstein: Advisors, trustees, anyone connected to that estate.
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Asher Lowenstein: For them, those 15 years meant depositions, document productions, testimony about meetings that had happened, you know, many years before that.
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Asher Lowenstein: Everybody understands this, but it just, you know, when you see an example that sort of brings it home, nobody wants to have to go through this, and that's what we're hoping to avoid.
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Asher Lowenstein: So, let's start with the first question that comes up.
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Asher Lowenstein: In virtually every estate contest, Because it's generally elderly people who commission and amend their state planning documents.
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Asher Lowenstein: The question is whether they had the capacity to do so.
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Asher Lowenstein: So…
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Asher Lowenstein: What is testamentary capacity? It's a legal threshold, and it's not much of a threshold. The standard is pretty easy to meet.
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Asher Lowenstein: And… The… the… the standard is the testator, the person
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Asher Lowenstein: Producing the will, or a settler in a trust.
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Asher Lowenstein: Must understand the proper… the nature of the property.
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Asher Lowenstein: The beneficiaries, that means the people who… that's determined as the natural objects of the bounty, and the plan.
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Asher Lowenstein: So, that's pretty simple to me. Understand the property, who's getting it, and the plan. It's a pretty low threshold, and this case I cited here in the bottom of the slide, the Georgia case, Wilson v. Lane, it illustrates this really vividly.
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Asher Lowenstein: In that case, the testatrix, the woman.
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Asher Lowenstein: Had this irrational fear of flooding in her home. She called the fire department once to report a fire that did not exist.
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Asher Lowenstein: And… Somebody, somebody involved in her, her, her life challenged?
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Asher Lowenstein: The… her will?
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Asher Lowenstein: the court upheld her will. The court said, and here I quote, eccentric habits and absurd beliefs
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Asher Lowenstein: Do not establish testamentary incapacity.
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Asher Lowenstein: So, it's not… it's not that hard to meet the standard, and for the same reason, someone diagnosed with mental illness is not necessarily disqualified, and the standard looks at whether there are lucid intervals.
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Asher Lowenstein: Are there periods of lucidity between those periods of incapacity? And if that is the case, then during those intervals, the testator is presumed to be… to have capacity and to be able to devise as he or she desires.
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Asher Lowenstein: I should just mention that there is a higher bar, With respect to irrevocable trusts.
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Asher Lowenstein: And that's because, unlike a will, an irrevocable trust takes effect immediately and is really a gift of sorts.
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Asher Lowenstein: And in the case of irrevocable trusts.
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Asher Lowenstein: The donor also has to understand the effect
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Asher Lowenstein: Of the transfer on his or her own financial security.
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Asher Lowenstein: So that's something that could add some complexity, especially in sophisticated estates.
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Asher Lowenstein: You know, involving multiple trust structures, the… that distinction is worth keeping in mind.
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Asher Lowenstein: So, given that low threshold.
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Asher Lowenstein: We might think that capacity is easy to establish, but in practice, it is frequently litigated.
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Asher Lowenstein: And… We want to think about ways to set up a record that…
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Asher Lowenstein: Their capacity was in place, there was testamentary capacity when the settler or the testator produced that will or trust.
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Asher Lowenstein: And the best way to do this is to build this persuasive record.
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Asher Lowenstein: Things like taking contemporaneous notes, detailed notes, that document the client's awareness throughout the process.
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Asher Lowenstein: In a will contest, the drafting attorney's file is often the most important piece of evidence in a case.
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Asher Lowenstein: And… The client's own words on the day of execution.
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Asher Lowenstein: Can win contests more than, you know, all sorts of fancy evidence might.
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Asher Lowenstein: So, sometimes the file's not enough.
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Asher Lowenstein: Particularly when a beneficiary… you have a beneficiary being disinherited, and that should be the…
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Asher Lowenstein: then signal that this is going to be more complicated, and there's… there's things to… more precautions have to be taken into consideration. These situations call for more.
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Asher Lowenstein: So… If you can get a medical or psychiatric evaluation before somebody executes.
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Asher Lowenstein: The document, that's the strongest record you can create.
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Asher Lowenstein: It obviously has to be done properly, and you have to…
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Asher Lowenstein: Keep that written report of the evaluation in the file.
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Asher Lowenstein: Some people like to use video recordings.
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Asher Lowenstein: And it can be an important tool, but you have to be careful with a recording of
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Asher Lowenstein: The individual at the time that he or she is It's executing the will.
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Asher Lowenstein: Or trust… They can explain what they're doing and why on the video, and that can be very helpful.
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Asher Lowenstein: Especially when the client presents well on camera.
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Asher Lowenstein: On the other hand, a video can also be used to show that the testator lacked capacity.
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Asher Lowenstein: And if a recording does not go well, then the question arises, what do you do with that video?
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Asher Lowenstein: And I would just caution that you should get guidance before you decide to do anything with it, because in litigation, the opposing party can get discovery into your process.
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Asher Lowenstein: And they might uncover that the video existed and was destroyed.
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Asher Lowenstein: Which, in itself, can create an inference of incapacity, which, possibly worse than the video itself would have cost. So, other options…
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Asher Lowenstein: That some people suggest include…
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Asher Lowenstein: a clause in the instrument, so in the will or the trust, you can have a clause there that says that there are no
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Asher Lowenstein: No amendments to this instrument are allowed without getting medical sign-off.
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Asher Lowenstein: And… That, that could be effective, that's nice.
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Asher Lowenstein: It might not be effective if the testator or settler goes ahead and amends anyway.
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Asher Lowenstein: And whether that would invalidate the amendment is not so clear, that would itself be something to litigate about. But at least it does create a… when the testator follows the instructions, it creates a procedural record that is very useful.
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Asher Lowenstein: And more generally, we want to consider somebody… when somebody becomes incapacitated, perhaps they should be moved off.
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Asher Lowenstein: Their fiduciary duties before any issues come up.
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Asher Lowenstein: Okay, this brings us to… undue influence.
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Asher Lowenstein: The second doctrine that comes up in nearly every contest is, generally, this is the most successful line of attack.
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Asher Lowenstein: And this is, the quote on the slide comes from a prominent casebook.
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Asher Lowenstein: They call it an unruly concept.
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Asher Lowenstein: Because it just doesn't behave like you would expect the… The concept to… to work…
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Asher Lowenstein: And unlike capacity, which is a relatively bright line, you can build a record around it, undue influence is much harder to defend against. The test is a qualitative test.
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Asher Lowenstein: And the evidence is almost always entirely circumstantial.
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Asher Lowenstein: The influencer is alone with the testator.
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Asher Lowenstein: The test data is not here anymore, or the settler, the court has to infer what happened.
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Asher Lowenstein: So, this is why so much what we do on the planning side
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Asher Lowenstein: Carry so much of the work that will eventually play into the question of undue influence.
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Asher Lowenstein: So, what do courts look for?
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Asher Lowenstein: This is the general, these four…
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Asher Lowenstein: elements are generally what courts will look for. The first thing is… so this is what tells us that you have an undue influence problem.
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Asher Lowenstein: First is whether there's susceptibility to influence, and that could just mean somebody who's elderly, somebody who's reliant on someone.
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Asher Lowenstein: Is there an opportunity to exert?
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Asher Lowenstein: That means the individual who's benefiting from a change, or from inner will, or in a trust, or somebody who
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Asher Lowenstein: Somehow gained from, or if it's an original trust that's created for that person's benefit.
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Asher Lowenstein: has the opportunity. So they're around.
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Asher Lowenstein: They spend time with the testator or settler?
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Asher Lowenstein: And… is there a result that does, in fact.
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Asher Lowenstein: benefit that person. This is not difficult to show. This is not rare, where you have somebody in this position with the opportunity to exert influence on somebody who is susceptible to it and does something that helps them.
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Asher Lowenstein: So, beyond the elements, courts often will find that if there's a confidential relationship, together with suspicious circumstances.
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Asher Lowenstein: Okay? What are suspicious circumstances that could be something as simple as changing the trust to benefit the person in question, the beneficiary, more than he or she would have received otherwise?
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Asher Lowenstein: And… That can even shift the burden to the party supporting the will.
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Asher Lowenstein: And that might even be possible for them to support, to prove that the will was above board. And the casebook illustration here is this case cited from Mississippi. In that case, a woman named Fannie Moses, she was widowed 3 times.
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Asher Lowenstein: She left nearly her entire estate to a lawyer who was both her attorney and her lover. He was 15 years younger than her.
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Asher Lowenstein: And… But he got an independent attorney to draft the will, and it was…
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Asher Lowenstein: it was really questionable whether there was anything suspicious at all, okay? It's quite likely she just wanted to leave her estate to him.
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Asher Lowenstein: No one disputed her capacity.
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Asher Lowenstein: Yet, the court struck down the will, because there was a confidential relationship here.
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Asher Lowenstein: The court found all those elements, susceptibility, opportunity, disposition.
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Asher Lowenstein: And so that's why it's a helpful case. It walks through all of these elements. And that just shows you that, this is…
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Asher Lowenstein: it's a very… can be a very difficult doctrine to have to deal with when litigation comes up, and that's why you want to take steps to… to set up the record properly. And here, this is just the… the…
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Asher Lowenstein: two concepts side by side. We have capacity, and it's a pretty low threshold, and then susceptibility generally would apply when you have somebody who's somewhat elderly.
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Asher Lowenstein: So, what about the warning signs? Warning signs, these are things we should be aware of. When you see them, this means you have to start paying more attention, and perhaps taking other steps.
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Asher Lowenstein: So, a beneficiary arranged the engagement. It was present at the execution, okay? So, who called the lawyer? Who called the financial planner to discuss changes to the trust?
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Asher Lowenstein: Was that a beneficiary? Was that maybe a grandchild? Well, that could be a problem. Instructions should come from the individual himself, who's the settler or the executor.
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Asher Lowenstein: Another… another warning signs when there's a significant departure from a prior.
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Asher Lowenstein: iteration of that will or trust.
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Asher Lowenstein: Or somebody who's a caregiver, a companion, suddenly becomes a substantial
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Asher Lowenstein: beneficiary. So, none of these factors is necessarily disqualifying, but the more elements that are present, the more difficult it becomes to prove that everything was done properly.
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Asher Lowenstein: And that there was no undue influence.
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Asher Lowenstein: So, what do we do? We want to control the process.
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Asher Lowenstein: So, what that means practically is we want to make sure that there are private meetings with the test data settler at every stage, not just the first.
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Asher Lowenstein: Sometimes, if somebody else gets involved, we have that caretaker, that grandchild that gets involved, maybe we need to reset the engagement.
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Asher Lowenstein: Okay, and just go back to the beginning and say, let's start this process over. Another thing that some people get caught up on.
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Asher Lowenstein: Is… it's really important to send drafts of any documents to the client, send them to the client, not to somebody else.
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Asher Lowenstein: Some plan… a lot of planners are reluctant to send documents because they're concerned that the client will execute them independently and won't pay them.
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Asher Lowenstein: And that's an understandable concern, but it's really important to…
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Asher Lowenstein: To create a record that can be upheld later.
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Asher Lowenstein: And you want to send this document, this draft, with a cover letter summarizing the provisions.
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Asher Lowenstein: That gives the client a real opportunity to review everything, and it closes off the argument that the individual, the settler, did not know what was in the documents.
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Asher Lowenstein: You want to generally use independent witnesses, not friends, and obviously, you want an affidavit, At execution.
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Asher Lowenstein: Get as much testimony from the witnesses as you can.
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Asher Lowenstein: And finally, just there is some misperception about whether a trust, a revocable trust, would…
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Asher Lowenstein: Changes the consideration at all?
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Asher Lowenstein: And… It doesn't really, because the same problems with capacity and undue influence apply to
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Asher Lowenstein: revocable trust to any trust, except there's one slight difference, and that is because the trust shifts the procedure onto the contestant.
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Asher Lowenstein: When it comes to a will, so all you have to do is object. You come to court and you say, I object to this will. With a replicable trust, you actually have to initiate some kind of proceeding and bring up the issues that you believe… that the contestant believes are with the will or trust.
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Asher Lowenstein: So, there's some other ideas that people have suggested.
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Asher Lowenstein: And… and here… here are some of them that are collected here.
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Asher Lowenstein: One of the most effective
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Asher Lowenstein: One effective way, I don't know if it's the most effective one, but some people have suggested executing several iterations of the same will or trust, or essentially the same one.
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Asher Lowenstein: Over time, over several years, because if somebody has expressed the same intent across several iterations, it's really hard to attack that than the one that appears right before they die. Another approach is to give lifetime gifts consistent with the testamentary plan.
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Asher Lowenstein: Because then, the client's conduct during life, Corroborates the documented intent.
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Asher Lowenstein: Some practitioners.
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Asher Lowenstein: When they have a client who comes to them and say they want to disinherit a beneficiary or forgive them significantly less.
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Asher Lowenstein: They will require that client to write a handwritten statement of what they want to do.
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Asher Lowenstein: And sometimes, in high-risk situations, you want to get independent counsel.
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Asher Lowenstein: That someone is completely separate from any beneficiary to remove any doubts about the testator's intent.
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Asher Lowenstein: And a lot of these elements tend to appear together, so one of the well-known examples of this had to do with the estate of Brook Astor. In that case.
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Asher Lowenstein: Her son, Arranged for the attorney to come and draft up the… the will?
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Asher Lowenstein: She was isolated from, you know, lots of her longtime friends.
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Asher Lowenstein: And this late amendment Redirected about $60 million away from charitable institutions.
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Asher Lowenstein: that she had planned to give to, and this was while the testator was… had Alzheimer's.
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Asher Lowenstein: And so you can see there's a lot of elements that were… didn't look… a lot of issues here with this will, and the point is that a lot of them come up together, a lot of the factors that could be used to disqualify an amendment as it actually did happen here.
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Asher Lowenstein: And there were professionals around her, they were positioned to notice these signals and ask questions, and that's what we want to think about when these patterns come up.
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Asher Lowenstein: Another… Important thing is we want to explain disinheritance or unequal treatment.
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Asher Lowenstein: One of the things to do is to explain somewhere, there can be a letter of explanation.
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Asher Lowenstein: There can be a memo in the file, there can be some kind of explanation in the trust document, but it has to be a really specific explanation.
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Asher Lowenstein: There's a phrase that lots of wills use, that they say, I'm giving less to my son for reasons known to my son, or I'm disinheriting him.
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Asher Lowenstein: And…
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Asher Lowenstein: Most of the time, the son turns around and says, I have no idea what my parent was talking about. So that phrase really doesn't close anything, and it, in fact, it invites the contest that we were trying to prevent.
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Asher Lowenstein: One of these… famously, one of the… there was an estate of Leona Helmsley, who left, $12 million for her dog. His name was Trouble.
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Asher Lowenstein: She disinherited two of her grandchildren.
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Asher Lowenstein: And she wrote… the trust said, for reasons that are known to them.
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Asher Lowenstein: That was the only explanation given.
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Asher Lowenstein: And those grandchildren challenged it, and they ended up, the court did reallocate some of the funds to them.
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Asher Lowenstein: And a counterexample to this is the case cited at this slide from Texas.
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Asher Lowenstein: The… the woman… a woman disinherited the children of a deceased son.
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Asher Lowenstein: And her will, recited the specific reasons, said that branch of the family had been distant and hadn't visited her. So even though there were suspicious… sorry, suspicious circumstances.
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Asher Lowenstein: Including who drafted the will and who the beneficiaries were, the court said that her explanation made sense, and that will was upheld.
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Asher Lowenstein: Okay, so let's move on to another topic, and…
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Asher Lowenstein: This has to do with precision in drafting. Many disputes begin with language that might seem clear to the people who are drafting the documents, might say things like equal shares for support to maintain a lifestyle.
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Asher Lowenstein: Those phrases might sound a little different a few years down the road, differently than they'd sounded at execution.
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Asher Lowenstein: And just a couple of examples. This is the first one, well, let me just mention this one from Robin Williams Estate.
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Asher Lowenstein: He had a widow, and when he died, a widow and 3 children from a prior marriage.
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Asher Lowenstein: And they litigated for a long time of the contents of the family home.
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Asher Lowenstein: And that fight was literally over 3 terms.
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Asher Lowenstein: Memorabilia, collectibles, and knickknacks.
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Asher Lowenstein: Who… what did those terms mean, and who did they go to?
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Asher Lowenstein: So, if they had spent time defining what they meant by those terms, they could have avoided
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Asher Lowenstein: Perhaps that long-drawn fight.
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Asher Lowenstein: And that's just important to really be precise about what we mean, especially in those situations where we think there might be a contest, there might be challenges to the plan.
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Asher Lowenstein: Okay, another related issue on the topic of precision.
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Asher Lowenstein: And this is where standards are used. So, we're familiar, many of us are familiar with the HEMS standard, that's Health, Education, Maintenance, and support.
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Asher Lowenstein: It's well understood, it's this great standard, the IRS recognizes it as an ascertainable standard.
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Asher Lowenstein: But it still generates disputes.
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Asher Lowenstein: what exactly does the support cover? And different trustees might have different answers.
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Asher Lowenstein: And some people use even looser standards.
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Asher Lowenstein: things like comfort, happiness, or best interests, which those terms, I should mention, are not recognized by the IRS.
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Asher Lowenstein: So, instead of these terms, instead of just using loose terms, which could generate disputes.
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Asher Lowenstein: We believe that there might be… there's a chance for challenges and disputes. We might want to use terms that… we might use a plan
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Asher Lowenstein: That involves fixed amounts, or formulas, providing based on a formula or a fixed amount.
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Asher Lowenstein: That spells out exactly what the beneficiaries are supposed to get.
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Asher Lowenstein: And finally, I think this is the final bullet, I think, is a very elegant solution…
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Asher Lowenstein: And that is… sometimes you can build in a trust protector, or that trust protector doesn't have to be somebody out there, it can be the law firm that helped draft the documents.
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Asher Lowenstein: And that could be a provision in the trust
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Asher Lowenstein: That, if there's any ambiguous language, the Trust Protector
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Asher Lowenstein: which maybe the law firm can come in and clean up the language. They can amend it to say what they believe it should say, and anyone who's gone through litigation over contract interpretation, I think, would appreciate the ability to have someone come up and clean up a straight phrase before it turns into a years-long
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Asher Lowenstein: dispute.
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Asher Lowenstein: Here's another problem that comes up, and that is to do with blended families.
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Asher Lowenstein: And it's almost impossible to draft this away.
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Asher Lowenstein: But we should be aware of this, and that's because the surviving spouse and children from a prior marriage often have directly opposed economic interests.
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Asher Lowenstein: So, and I just want to mention, there's a case here at the bottom.
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Asher Lowenstein: the New York case from last year has been getting some significant attention. What happened in this case is the…
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Asher Lowenstein: husband-funded irrevocable trusts, and in a later divorce action, he argued that the assets should not be considered marital property. So there was a question of the assets when they were transferred to the trust, if they were the husbands or they were marital property.
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Asher Lowenstein: And… The… eventually, it was set aside, and the court found that the… the wife
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Asher Lowenstein: got to have an equal share of those assets. But, part of the problem was the way he had set up
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Asher Lowenstein: the plan set up what assets did belong to the wife, so that was entirely real estate and investment accounts that had massive unrealized capital gains taxes. So if she had tried to live off those assets, tried to liquidate them for her share to live, she would have faced immediate
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Asher Lowenstein: heavy tax liabilities, and that would shrink her actual payout, and in fact, she would have been evicted from her homes. So…
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Asher Lowenstein: Part of the consideration here is…
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Asher Lowenstein: you know, I don't know what would have worked under those circumstances, maybe the wife would have challenged it regardless of the plan, but the fairer the plan is.
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Asher Lowenstein: So we're not putting her in this terrible situation that becomes much easier to defend. And this is a very common pattern that people try to cut out completely a former spouse or a stepchild, and this is often what leads to litigation. This is something that I see fairly often, and you have families who own a business.
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Asher Lowenstein: They want to leave their business to their children equally.
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Asher Lowenstein: And often, equal shares in a business is not the right approach, because what tends to happen is you have some of the children involved in the business, and others are not, and the ones who are not involved in the business want to cash out.
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Asher Lowenstein: So, what people should consider in advance is preparing insurance, sort of, with a… an estate equalization plan, an insurance that can solve for these problems and allow the
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Asher Lowenstein: The children who are only passively invested to cash out, to get their share, and to allow the business to continue.
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Asher Lowenstein: Okay, here's what we have. Here's the insurance equalization, estate equalization, insurance. Okay, this is another area of valuation where… where some other plans… otherwise, sound plans can get unwound.
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Asher Lowenstein: And this has to do sometimes that the trustee might have too much discretion to decide value, and instead of giving the trustee unbounded discretion, maybe it's better to build in specific requirements of how to go about and get an independent evaluation.
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Asher Lowenstein: This is Trustee, It's a choice that is very often underestimated. People, by default.
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Asher Lowenstein: Choose a family member, and these are… can be…
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Asher Lowenstein: You know, are great… can be great… the best trustees in some cases, but they also carry some liability exposure, because there's conflict of interest questions.
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Asher Lowenstein: And if there is something that… a concern that there will be disputes, then it's really important to have… to consider, at least, having an independent trustee in place instead of a family member. And the trustee should have
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Asher Lowenstein: In those cases, rather than giving the trustee
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Asher Lowenstein: full discretion on how to invest and what to do. Again, consider limiting the trustee's discretion, because that could avoid disputes down the road.
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Asher Lowenstein: And… Finally, I want to just mention that the… there's… the financial professionals play an important role.
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Asher Lowenstein: And it might be the cognitive decline that becomes apparent at a meeting where there's a sudden new companion at a brokerage account, or there's, you know, a rushed change of plan when the client is sick. So, financial professionals are often the first to see the signals, and they are frequently called as witnesses.
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Asher Lowenstein: And sometimes they can even be defendants. So, the financial professionals have an important role here.
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Asher Lowenstein: And here's a summary of these topics we just spoke. It looks like we're out of time now.
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Asher Lowenstein: So, thank you very much for your time. My contact information is on the slide.
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Asher Lowenstein: Please feel free to reach out with any questions, and now, Jonathan, let me turn it back to you.
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Jonathan Shenkman: Great, thank you so much, Asher. If any was any specific questions, new business opportunities, or any other issues they'd like to discuss, please feel free to reach out directly to Asher or myself where appropriate, and I'll be sure to also include
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Jonathan Shenkman: his contact information in the follow-up email to this program. Just 3 more quick items before I let you go today. First, my next webinar's on Tuesday, June 9th at 8.30 a.m. on Don't Lean On Me, How to Discharge IRS and New York State Tax Liens featuring
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Jonathan Shenkman: Scott Kestenbaum and Jill Monesson from the firm Kestenbaum & Mark LLP, based on Long Island, New York, and I'll be sure to send out the invitation to this program in the coming days. In the meantime, if you have a friend or a colleague who'd find these webinars of interest, they can subscribe to my webinar distribution list on my website at parkbridgewealth.com forward slash webinars. Second, you can follow all my work on X and Instagram at Jonathan Amanian by connecting with me on LinkedIn.
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Jonathan Shenkman: You could also listen to my weekly podcast called Jonathan on Money, which is available on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. And you can watch my practical planning videos, which I post several times a week by following me on YouTube at Jonathan on Money as well. And third, please take 30 seconds to fill out my survey at the end of this program. It helps me improve my webinars and provide timely and interesting content to attendees.
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Jonathan Shenkman: I thank you in advance for that. And with that, this concludes today's session. Please stay safe and healthy, and have a wonderful day, everybody.