A Quiet Weekend Here / Studying Wills

It's been a quiet weekend here. I'm not complaining, because the coming week will be busy.

I've been tweaking the CSS for the blog. If I don't accomplish anything else here, at least I'm learning a bit about CSS and XHTML.

I also spent part of the weekend studying will and trust drafting. I didn't study wills and trusts in law school except in my first-year property class, so preparing for the bar exam provided me with my first significant exposure to the topic. I found it interesting. The Colorado bar exam's coverage of wills and trusts does not include estate taxes, however -- there's no taxation at all on the Colorado exam. Taxation continues to be a significant consideration in the organization of large estates, so I'm going to have to spend some time studying that. I find even so-called "simple" wills intriguing, though, because of the intensely personal nature of the choices that they can involve. People generally don't like thinking about death, and the kinds of decisions people may have to make about what happens to their property and family when they die are very challenging emotionally. Many people never even try to find out what happens if they die without a will, leaving their family members taken aback by the distribution of property that results when they die.

Many non-lawyers out there might not know that state laws about "intestate succession" govern who inherits what when someone dies without a will. For example, imagine an unmarried man with no children who dies in Colorado his 60s leaving his mother, two sisters, two nieces and a nephew. Imagine that he has no real estate, but he has a respectable amount of retirement savings and some treasured personal property. Imagine further that he seemed to have vaguely indicated his intent to leave certain pieces of property to his nieces, sisters, and nephew, but he never wrote anything down. Who gets what? Under Colorado law, all of his property passes to his mother. C.R.S. sect. 15-11-103(2). If she rejects it, it is divided equally between his sisters. This may upset members of the younger generations, especially younger family members who had developed personal attachments to some of the heirlooms they had expected to receive. No one knows exactly what the decedent wanted to happen to his property when he died, but everyone's pretty sure that this wasn't quite it.

In my view, time spent helping people address those emotionally challenging questions and getting their wishes properly established on paper so that they and their families can avoid that kind of scenario would be time well spent.