What Went Wrong is our series on real, published cases. Each entry follows what the documents said, what the court did, and what it teaches. Every quotation comes from the court’s own opinion. These are other parties’ cases, not our clients, and they predict nothing about any reader’s situation.
In 1970, an Idaho family put its company into an irrevocable trust for the benefit of the generations to come. The drafting attorney, whom nobody in the family can identify today, wrote the beneficiary clause to pay income to “each then living male child whose name is TERTELING.” At the time, the founder had four young sons and no daughters. Nobody noticed the word doing its quiet work. Nobody would for twenty-five years.
The discovery
In 1995 the first granddaughter was born, and her grandfather read the trust with new eyes. The instrument he believed protected his whole family excluded her by sex. Triplets arrived in 1998, two girls and a boy. The boy was a beneficiary. His sisters were not.
The grandfather went to a lawyer in the late 1990s to fix it and was told it could not be done. An irrevocable trust, unambiguous words, no judicial road. So the family lived with the mistake for another two decades, which is what most families do after the first “no.”
The villain interlude
Before the fix came the fraud, and it tells you what a drafting error is worth to the wrong relative. In 2020 a cousin, excluded from benefits because he had been an original co-trustee, spotted his own road into the trust. The clause paid male children named Terteling, so he would manufacture one. At about 75 years old he adopted a 66-year-old man, who changed his surname to Terteling and, in the opinion’s words, “then applied to the Bank to be added as a beneficiary” of the trust.
It unraveled. The adoption was vacated once the court learned the residency and the parental relationship had both been sworn to falsely, and criminal charges followed, including attempted grand theft. But notice the mechanism. The one-word drafting error did not just exclude the granddaughters. It published a recipe that a determined relative tried to cook, half a century later.
The rescue, and the affidavit that won it
In 2022 the founder, his former wife, and the three granddaughters petitioned to reform the trust. The objector was a family member too, the granddaughters’ own brother, a contingent beneficiary defending the clause that excluded his sisters.
Reformation of a trust requires clear and convincing evidence that the words on the page misfired, and here the family had something better than memory. In 1978, for a completely unrelated reason (a bank joining as co-trustee wanted comfort about investment duties), every one of the original trustors had signed an affidavit stating that the trust’s purpose was holding the family company “for the benefit of successive generations of the family.” No gender. Signed by all of them, including the aunt and uncle who were long dead by the time anyone went to court.
That routine, forgotten document became the case. The Idaho Supreme Court reasoned that “had the male restriction actually been intended, the clarification of intent in the 1978 Affidavit would have kept the same language as Article III.” Three courts in a row agreed, and in November 2024 the reformation stood. The beneficiary clause now reads gender neutral, the way the family says it was always meant to.
Two legal points carried the day, and both travel. Unambiguous language does not block reformation; the whole point of the remedy is fixing words that clearly say the wrong thing. And because a trust is a gift rather than a bargain, “a unilateral mistake on the part of the settlor is ordinarily sufficient to warrant reformation.”
What it teaches, in Florida
Florida has the same door, by statute. The rule the Idaho court applied comes from the Uniform Trust Code, and Florida enacted its own version, which lets a court reform even unambiguous trust terms to match the settlor’s true intent on clear and convincing evidence. Our annotation of Florida’s trust reformation statute covers how these cases actually run here. Reformation is also only one of Florida’s repair tools; for a trust that needs modernizing rather than a one-word fix, decanting or a restatement may be the better road.
The paper trail wins cases the witnesses cannot. By the time this family reached court, two of the five signing trustors were dead. What proved their intent was a contemporaneous signed statement made for another purpose entirely. That is the strongest argument we know for writing intent down while everyone is alive, in letters of intent, in recitals, and in a purpose clause that says why the trust exists. The affidavit nobody remembered signing was worth more than every living witness.
A first “no” is not the law forever. This family was told in the 1990s that reformation was impossible, and for the law of that moment the advice may have been fair. The Uniform Trust Code changed the landscape. Decades later, a second opinion opened the courthouse door. If an old trust in your family carries something everyone agrees is wrong, the answer you got twenty years ago may simply be out of date.
Old trusts carry old assumptions. Instruments drafted generations ago sometimes contain restrictions no one would write today, and families assume “irrevocable” means untouchable. It does not. It means the fix requires the right tool, the right evidence, and usually some family diplomacy, because as this case shows, the objector is often at the same holiday table.
The case. Terteling v. Terteling, No. 50736 (Idaho, Nov. 1, 2024). Quotations are from the court’s published opinion. The parties were not clients of this firm; Idaho law governed the case, and the Florida statutes discussed above govern Florida trusts. Every case turns on its own facts.
Related Guides
- Reforming a Florida trust (Fla. Stat. 736.0415)
- Trust amendment vs restatement
- Fixing an irrevocable trust by decanting
- Florida trust litigation attorney
Reviewed by Kevin D. Klagge, Esq., Fla. Bar No. 99502. Attorney Kevin Klagge represents families, businesses, and international clients in estate and tax planning, business structuring, and international law, with a focus on Florida legal tools. He litigates estate and business issues in court. This article is general information about Florida law, not legal advice, and does not create an attorney-client relationship.