Beneficial Trusts and Wills
One of the most common questions we get is about being able to search for a beneficial trust or will when a person is a member of a family and somebody is deceased in that family. You may have an interest in finding out if you have any beneficial assets coming to you, whether it’s bank accounts, real estate, vehicles, corporate assets, or any other type of beneficiary items that belong to you rightfully.
Suspicions of Improper Asset Distribution
Many times, there’s a suspicion that other members of the family may be improperly diverting assets away from what is rightfully yours to benefit themselves or others. If that’s the case, part of the process to discover that and to defeat that is to identify and document the proper assignment of those assets. These assets could be held in a trust, could be part of a will, or part of probate, and searching for those original documents is extremely important.
Accidental or Intentional Mismanagement of Assets
Sometimes this is done accidentally maybe the trustee or the executor of the estate wasn’t really clear on exactly how to distribute the assets. Sometimes it’s done intentionally, where somebody wants more than their fair share. So if you have a suspicion that in your family there may have been improper distributions of assets, whether they’re bank accounts or hidden assets as part of a family law case or probate case, we consider that probate fraud. It’s fraud upon their own family; people are stealing from their own family.
Investigating and Protecting Your Interests
Discovering those documents is extremely important as part of the investigation. Finding out where they may be registered, domiciled, stored, or cross-referenced with other records is crucial so that you can reveal the true interests of the person who’s deceased or they don’t even have to be deceased. They could be somebody who is in long-term care, maybe they have a conservatorship or some other type of supervisory situation, even medical care. You want to make sure that nobody in your family or even an executor is improperly diverting assets that belong to you or other members of your family.
