Trust & Estate Litigation
Representation for beneficiaries, trustees, and heirs in contested trust and estate matters across Sacramento, Placer, and Yolo counties.
Protecting What Matters When Disputes Arise
Trust and estate disputes are rarely just about money. They involve family relationships, a loved one's final wishes, and a fiduciary who is supposed to be acting for someone else's benefit. When that trust breaks down – that is, when a trustee won't account, distributes unfairly, or serves their own interests over the beneficiaries' – the law provides remedies, but pursuing them requires precision and persistence.
Carlson & Gevelinger represents clients on both sides of these disputes: beneficiaries who need to hold a fiduciary accountable, and trustees or executors defending decisions made in good faith.
Matters Handled
Compelled Accountings When a trustee refuses to provide the accounting beneficiaries are entitled to, California law provides a mechanism to compel one. Carlson & Gevelinger petitions to require trustees to open the books and account for their administration.
Breach of Fiduciary Duty Trustees and executors owe strict duties of loyalty, impartiality, and care. When those duties are breached (through self-dealing, favoritism, or neglect, for example), beneficiaries may seek surcharge, removal, and other remedies.
Trustee Self-Dealing Transactions in which a trustee benefits personally are subject to heightened scrutiny. The firm handles matters involving conflicted transactions and the presumptions California law applies to them.
Will & Trust Contests Challenges based on lack of capacity, undue influence, fraud, or improper execution – and the defense of instruments against such challenges.
Beneficiary Disputes Disagreements over interpretation, distribution, and administration among beneficiaries and remaindermen.
Trustee Removal & Surcharge Petitions to remove a fiduciary who has breached their duties and to hold them financially responsible for resulting losses.
Trust Disputes in Blended Families & Estates in Transition
Some of the hardest matters we handle don't belong to any single field. When a parent dies, the surviving stepparent and the children from a first marriage may read the trust very differently. Or a couple divorces while one of them is still administering a late parent's estate. Or a trust was funded with what one spouse insists was separate property, and now that characterization decides who gets what.
These matters sit at the intersection of trust law, community property, and family law, and they turn on questions most practitioners don't confront every day:
Blended-family trust disputes navigating competing claims among a surviving spouse and children from prior relationships, and the interpretation of trusts designed to balance them
Property tracing and characterization, following separate property that was contributed to a trust or commingled over a marriage, and carrying the burden of proof that tracing requires
Dissolution during estate administration: divorce that overlaps with an ongoing probate or trust, where an interest in one proceeding becomes an asset in the other
Coordinating parallel proceedings: keeping a family court matter and a probate matter from working at cross purposes
There aren't many attorneys in this region who work at this intersection regularly. If your situation doesn't fit neatly into "divorce" or "probate," it may be exactly the kind of matter we can handle.
Trust & Estate Litigation: An Overview of the Process
Most trust and estate disputes in California proceed in the probate department of the superior court. The process typically begins with a petition – to compel an accounting, to surcharge a trustee, to remove a fiduciary, or to contest an instrument. From there, matters move through discovery, potential settlement, and, where necessary, trial.
Because these cases turn on documents, financial records, and the specific duties California law imposes on fiduciaries, early and thorough preparation matters. Carlson & Gevelinger’s approach is to build the factual record carefully, apply the governing law precisely, and pursue resolution efficiently, while remaining ready to litigate when a fair resolution isn't available.