Keeping the Peace in Decades-Old Family Feud

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What Happened

Parents who create a trust often choose just one of their children to serve as successor trustee after both their deaths. In some families, everyone accepts the parents’ choice, and trust administration proceeds smoothly. However, in others, the selection of one child over other offspring can lead to hotly contested litigation, especially once the parents are gone.

In a recently resolved case, our client’s parents had accumulated wealth by acquiring and managing a number of multifamily residential properties, along with their family home and several vacation properties. Over the years, they brought our client, their son, into the family business, while their two daughters pursued separate paths.

Our client became a partner with his parents in the business entities that held the family assets. Eventually, he took on the role of managing partner and acquired an individual ownership interest, while his parents held the remaining interest through their trust. The trust named our client as trustee and provided that, after the parents were gone, each of the children would have an interest in the trust’s income and assets.

Sadly, both parents passed away in the same month, leading our client to start actively overseeing the trust while continuing as managing partner of the family businesses. Although tensions had been brewing between him and his sisters for years, they boiled over when his sisters filed a petition seeking to remove him as trustee on the bases of decades-old incidents and asserted claims that he was improperly managing the trust and family businesses.

As a result, for the next few years of litigation, our client managed the business and trust assets for the benefit of all, while also defending himself against ongoing charges by his sisters and their attorneys.

How Keystone Was Able to Help

Our client retained us a few months after litigation began to replace his original counsel. When Keystone stepped in, there were several unresolved litigation matters pending, as well as issues concerning the family’s business operations. Faced with an uncertain path through this complex maze of issues, our client knew he wanted to end up managing and owning as many assets as possible. His sisters, however, had other goals.

After being retained, the primary focus of our trust and estate attorneys was to resolve pending litigation issues, which included minimizing any bases for removing our client as trustee. In doing so, Keystone cultivated a professional relationship with the sisters’ law firm. Thus, when our client proceeded to sell two of the rental properties to raise cash, our firm was able to work with the sisters’ counsel to obtain their consent, both to the sales and distribution of the proceeds from the sales.

Nevertheless, litigation continued. Over the course of many months, Keystone worked with the sisters’ counsel to reach compromises over disputes surrounding the percentage interest our client individually held in the family businesses apart from the trust’s interests.

Once that was resolved, the attorneys pivoted to finding an acceptable solution to dividing the assets and separating the parties’ individual interests, rather than locking them into a business partnership with one another for the rest of their lives. The parties focused on finding an acceptable way to distribute the family residence and vacation properties among them. In addition, they reached an agreement on how to divide the remaining business assets in a way that allowed our client to retain ownership of most of the rental properties, with his sisters “cashing out” their interests. After many more months of difficult and fluid negotiations, the parties reached a final agreement that was approved by the court and ended the litigation.

By handling a complex situation step by step and fostering a professional relationship with the sisters’ counsel — one focused on the present interests of all concerned rather than on decades-old family disputes — Keystone was successful in helping its client preserve and separate his business interests from his sisters’ interests while amicably settling the litigation.