Deirdre Wheatley-Liss: 4 Good (?) Reasons to Contest a Will

Posted by on Monday, July 15, 2013 · Leave a Comment 

Maybe it’s the season, but I have gotten a lot of calls recently about will contests.  A will contest usually happens when your heirs are surprised by what your will says, or by what you have left when you go to the great beyond.  I have represented both heirs and estates, and in all cases there are some big misunderstandings about the reasons you can challenge a will.  And no, being disappointed is not a legal cause of action.

 

First, this post is an except from my new book Plan Your Own Estate:  Passing on Your Assets and Your Values Legally and Efficiently (Apress 2013).  Want to know more?  Click the link and 350+ pages of fun (I swear) estate planning knowledge is yours!

Sometimes, the heirs are surprised because something hinky is going on. Mom said all her life she was leaving her assets equally to her kids, yet daughter Donna took Mom to her lawyer and Mom suddenly (6 months before she died) named Donna sole beneficiary.

More ofter, when your heirs are surprised by what your will says, it could be they thought they were getting something, and you intended for them to get nothing.  If that’s the case, make sure you are super clear about your intentions.  When you aren’t, quite a good deal of money could go to defending your will.

From Plan Your Own Estate:  Passing on Your Assets and Your Values Legally and Efficiently (Apress 2013). 

4 Reasons to Contest a Will

The good news is that, despite what you see on TV, there are only four limited grounds on which to contest a will:

  • The will wasn’t signed in accordance with state law. All the way back at the beginning of this book, I harped on how important it is to have a will properly executed under state law. If a will fails to meet the very stringent execution standards, then it won’t be deemed to be a will. If it’s not a will, it can’t transfer your property at death. This is one of the biggest areas of concern I have with using an online service or do-it-yourself estate planning-if you don’t get the signature section right, you don’t have a valid estate plan. This has led to many a person believing that they have a perfectly valid estate plan-but instead leaving their heirs in for a very nasty surprise because the will wasn’t executed properly.
  • Lack of testamentary capacity. This invalidates a will on the grounds that the person executing the will was incompetent to do so at the time they did it. You most often see this issue raised regarding an older person who modifies their will and removes some people who were beneficiaries under a prior will. The fact of the matter is that the level of capacity required to execute a will isn’t very high; it’s actually lower than the level of capacity needed to execute a contract. In essence, in order to be competent to execute a will, a person needs to know (1) the nature and value of their assets, (2) who would receive their assets if they didn’t have a will, and (3) the legal effect of signing the will. Someone would have a long road ahead of them to prove you didn’t have the capacity to execute your will. It’s hard to come by historic evidence of lack of capacity.
  • Undue influence. This is the biggie when it comes to will contests. The issue is that if a person is in aconfidential relationshipwith you, then the person might be able to cause you such duress about your will that you lose your independence of thought process. What if you rely on one of your daughters to cook and clean for you, and she hints that unless she gets the house, she won’t be able to continue helping you? Or, what if a hired caregiver threatens to withhold your medication unless you change your will to benefit them? Or, perhaps your nephew helpfully drives you to his attorney to create a new will, which just happens to leave everything to him. When a will has unequal distributions, or distributions to non-family members, a court is reasonably concerned that the will was created out of fear that the favored beneficiary would cease caring for or even harm the person making out the will. Nine months before you died, were you threatened into changing your will to name your caregiver as the primary beneficiary? Or has your caregiver helped you for eight years, you don’t see your relatives, and you just got around to making out your will nine months before you died? This is such a fact-based inquiry that, again, undue influence is very hard to prove.
  • Fraud. You give a person a contract to sign, and it turns out someone slipped a will into the document and the person didn’t know they were signing a will. The will is invalid because it clearly isn’t an expression of the person’s intent. Another fraudulent situation is where somebody slips pages into the middle of the will. This is why I have the person making out a will or revocable trust initial each and every page.

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