Probate

Probate court administration involves processes used to settle a person’s property after he or she dies.  Sometimes it is needed, sometimes not.

One process is authenticating a deceased person’s last will and testament as their true and legally effective will. Alone that process is called “probating a will” or “spreading a will of record.”  Usually it also involves seeking appointment of a Personal Representative, but not always.  A will can be probated without opening an estate, or to put it differently, without seeking appointment of a Personal Representative.

The other main process is seeking appointment of, and qualifying a Personal Representative.  That’s an officer of the court, who gets authorized to act as executor of the will and do what is required by the will and the law.  Probate courts can appoint a “P.R.” if there is a will, or without a will if the deceased was “intestate.”  In an intestate estate, there’s no will, but property goes according to the state laws of inheritance.

Probate, then, refers both to the judicial process of administering decedents’ estates, generally, and more specifically to the actual order by which a court validates a specific document as someone’s last will and testament.

There’s a lot of commonly held misbeliefs about probate which are a consequence of boogeyman style marketing. Certainly, it’s true that probate is a transparent and orderly process that creates accountability in the person who seeks the office of Personal Representative.  That process involves lots of documentation by the P.R. and lawyers and often accountants.  Those accountability processes can be time consuming and laborious, which is the source of some of the consternation we hear from people who’ve been though the process and found it burdensome.  Handled poorly, probate can become a mess.  At our office, we seek to settle probate estates promptly, efficiently, lawfully, fairly, and in a way that leaves people feeling satisfied.