NC Fiduciary Litigation Commentary
It usually starts with something small: a vendor payment you don’t recognize, personal charges on the company card, or a bank balance lower than it should be. Then you start looking and find more, like payments to companies your partner controls, customers steered to a side business, or records that are suddenly hard to get.…
A family business rarely has two separate identities. The founders are also spouses, siblings, or a parent and child, and the operating agreement, if one exists at all, usually reflects that closeness by saying almost nothing about what happens when one of them dies. That gap becomes the entire problem the moment it happens. The…
A construction crew renovating a defunct brewery in Dendermonde, Belgium, drilled into what they assumed was a stash of one-euro coins. It wasn’t. Workers found 49 gold bars and more than 4,000 coins sealed inside a brick cellar, a cache worth an estimated $10 million with no paperwork and no obvious owner. Police secured the…
A jury summons in North Carolina starts with a name pulled from two lists: registered voters and licensed drivers. Each county’s Jury Commission draws from that combined pool at random, and the clerk mails a summons with instructions on when and where to report. Anyone at least 18, a resident of the county, and able…
Famous actor Chadwick Boseman died in August 2020. On July 17, his brothers, Derrick and Kevin, filed a petition in a Los Angeles court asking the judge to remove Boseman’s widow, Taylor Simone Ledward, as administrator of his estate. The reason, according to the filing: nearly six years after his death, and almost four years…
One year after Malcolm-Jamal Warner drowned in Costa Rica, his widow filed suit against his mother, who serves as successor trustee of his family trust, seeking more than $1.2 million. The claim is straightforward: Warner signed a prenuptial agreement promising to buy a $1,000,000 term life insurance policy naming his wife as beneficiary, pay her…
Every few months, a client calls convinced that a parent’s estate plan was obviously the product of manipulation. The plan changed late in life. It favored a caregiver, a new spouse, or one child over the others, and the family takes that unfairness as proof enough. It isn’t. North Carolina courts don’t ask whether a…
A competitor undercuts you using pricing information your former sales manager wasn’t supposed to have. A vendor doubles as your customer’s new supplier behind your back. A departing executive walks out with your client list and starts calling your accounts before his non-compete is even a week old. Business owners ask the same question in…
Business relationships fall apart. When they do, the first question we ask isn’t “what happened?” It’s “what kind of entity are you dealing with?” People use “shareholder dispute” and “partnership dispute” interchangeably. They shouldn’t. The entity structure determines the legal framework — which means it determines your rights, your remedies, and your realistic path forward.…
On June 1st, a Kendall County judge sentenced Karen Kay Hogan, a 69-year-old wills and trust attorney from San Antonio, to 20 years in prison for stealing over $500,000 from six children whose parents died in a murder-suicide three and a half years earlier. A Texas probate court appointed Hogan to administer both estates. She…