Robert S. Wright, Atty at Law Estate Lawyer Won't Fix His Own Mistake, Locks Beneficiary Out of Inheritance Fresno California

The Problem:  Robert S. Wright was hired by Randy M. Doughty to draft a living trust filed in Fresno, CA in 2005.  The grantor died on March 29, 2015, but made an error in estate planning with Wright when he suggested a Special Needs Trust.  

Wright appears to have gone forward with too much here and, rather than doing his due diligence by meeting with the beneficiaries for planning, taxes, and clarity, he decided to type it all up and go to court to file a trust with an erroneous section claiming paranoia as a condition of her oldest son, hence the special needs trust.   

There is no diagnosis and he is not paranoid, at least not in the psychiactric sense, but even though he informed Wright of the issue, Wright refused to change the documents to an ordinary trust situation rather than a special needs trust.  If one were to research the SNT, they are dissolvable if it can be shown that it's no longer needed.  That would be a quick remedy to the situation if Wright would work together with the family, but he has refused to.  He is insisting that the grantor made the mistake and he was simply typing up what they stated.  This has made distributions from the estate difficult and changed the tax situation.

Originally, the trustee had agreed to split the SNT account with the oldest beneficiary.  Now he has changed his story and intends to deposit the rest of the split into the SNT and begin to distribute from it.  We are talking about more than one account here and the SNT account was the smallest.

The Solution:  Wright needs either to dissolve the SNT with some sort of document or court filing, or he can go before a judge to create what is called a constructive trust to manage the faulty or fraudulent one.

If you are reading this and are a probate judge or estate lawyer, please tell me if this is possible because I expected Wright to come up with it first.  The idea came from the following web posting:

Is Wright guilty of fraud?  Is he guilty of legal malpractice?  I think this this is a complicated issue, but one thing is clear, Wright isn't really interested in correcting his work.  He is pushing the situation into a courtroom which takes extra time and money, instead of fixing the problem by putting in his own work.  Why pay two lawyers rather than just fix this himself?  This also raises consumer affairs questions, so there has been a complaint to Adult Protective Services regarding financial abuse.

Wright should do the right thing and work things out for the beneficiaries.