February 15th, 2012

This week, let’s take a look at another case from Florida.  You see a lot of trust instruments that ‘require’ a “corporate co-trustee.”  There are a lot of good reasons why the grantor may have wanted a corporate co-trustee to serve with a family member, friend, or other co-trustee.

Then again, as time goes by, a corporate co-trustee may no longer make a lot of sense.  It could be that the trust has been substantially administered or that the corpus is so small that a corporate trustee’s fee schedule just doesn’t work.  That’s when the beneficiaries and trustees usually get together and go to court to have the trust modified to permit the corporate trustee’s resignation and have the trust modified either to allow a single trustee or to allow an individual to serve as co-trustee.  These things are often done by consent order, which the judge is happy to sign to move another case off his or her docket.

But what happens if the trust instrument specifically prohibits judicial modification? (more…)