Skip to content
StepUp Law logo StepUp Law

What Went Wrong: The Two Words That Froze a Trust

Published 2026-08-19

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.

Not long ago I told my six-year-old and four-year-old daughters, “As long as you are both playing nicely together, you can use all the Magna-Tiles to build whatever you want. Make a mess.” A little while later my four-year-old lost interest and wandered off. When I looked up again, my six-year-old was frozen in place, not touching a single tile. She was convinced that because “both” of them were no longer playing, the tiles were now forbidden.

I fixed it with one sentence. If your sister stops playing, you may keep building. Then I sat with the thought for a while, because my six-year-old had reasoned her way into the same trap an Oregon appellate court spent this spring untangling. A trust gave a married couple everything “during their joint lives” and said nothing about what happens when one of them is gone. The survivor has now spent six years in litigation over whether she may touch what she and her husband built.

The setup

In 2007, Judy and Lee Beaumont, an Oregon couple who each brought adult children into the marriage, signed the Beaumont Family Trust. They deeded in their home in Gold Hill, a commercial property, and a rental house, and later added bonds and two vehicles. The children on both sides were the secondary beneficiaries, the standard blended-family shape. By its own terms, the trust became irrevocable when the first spouse died.

The instrument ran eleven articles, and one phrase kept coming back. The purpose clause held the assets for the couple “during their joint lifetimes.” The revocation article let “Either of the Settlors, during their joint lives,” revoke the trust in whole or in part. A co-trustee clause let either spouse act alone “during their joint lives and while serving as Co-trustees.” And Article 7, the only article that moves money to the couple, opened with the words “During Settlors’ joint lives.” Four appearances, four different jobs, one recycled phrase.

What no article did was govern the years between the two deaths. Article 7 ran the trust while both spouses lived. Article 8 paid death expenses. Article 9 distributed everything after the surviving spouse died. The season in the middle, when one spouse is gone and the other is still living in the house the trust owns, appears nowhere in the document. Nobody defends the drafting. In the appellate court’s words, “Both the parties and the trial court agreed that the trust instrument is poorly drafted.”

The fight

Lee died in April 2018. Judy became sole trustee and kept managing the assets the way she says the two of them always had. That August, Lee’s son found a copy of the trust and shared it with his sister, Lizabeth Dombrowsky. She received no accountings until after she sued in February 2020, alleging breach of trust and asking the court to remove her stepmother as trustee. Judy counterclaimed for reformation, arguing mutual mistake, and invoked the trust’s penalty clause, which gave one dollar to any beneficiary who contested the trust.

Everything turned on two words. Webster’s defines “joint” to mean “joined, united, or combined,” and the whole case lives inside that dictionary entry. Judy read “joint lives” as their combined lifetimes, ending only at the second death, so Article 7 still provided for her. Dombrowsky read a united lifetime, over when both no longer lived, so Article 7 switched off in April 2018 and every distribution after that was a breach.

At trial in March 2023, Judy testified to what the couple meant. “So the intention of the trust was to provide for the surviving spouse for the rest of their life. And then we put our wishes on paper, including every one of our kids and grandkids that were alive at that time.” When counsel asked what she believed would happen with the trust funds “after the first of you died,” she got as far as “The intention that my husband and I wrote this” before a hearsay objection stopped the answer, and the judge sustained it.

The trial court held that “joint lives” unambiguously meant the period while both settlors were alive, and the dominoes fell in a straight line. Withdrawals became breaches, breaches supported removal, and Judy left the courtroom removed as trustee, barred from distributions, and ordered to pay Dombrowsky’s attorney fees.

The Oregon Court of Appeals took that apart. Both readings are plausible, it held, and the trial court’s reading breaks the document, because “applying that interpretation to every use of the term in the document results in an inexplicable gap in which the agreement is silent as to the purpose of the trust and how it is to be administered while only one settlor is alive.” Then the sentence that earns this case its place in the series. “Under Dombrowsky and the trial court’s reading of the terms, that period of time would be left as an administrative black hole, where the survivor is still trustee but no one, neither the survivor nor the secondary beneficiaries, can receive any distributions from the trust or have any right to the trust property.” The holding followed. “Because there is no single interpretation of the term ‘joint lives’ that renders the trust instrument as a whole coherent, it is inherently ambiguous.”

The evidence ruling fell too, because Judy’s blocked testimony “would have been admissible under 803(3) as a statement of Lee’s state of mind,” Oregon’s state-of-mind hearsay exception. The removal fell with it. “Depending on how the ambiguity of the term ‘joint lives’ is resolved on remand, some of Beaumont’s acts might no longer be breaches of trust.” The fee award fell as a matter of law.

One piece went against Judy and stayed there. Her penalty-clause counterattack failed, because Oregon authorizes those clauses only against challenges to a trust’s validity. “The authority granted by that statute is specifically limited to challenges to validity, and as a form of forfeiture, in terrorem clauses should be construed strictly to their terms.” Dombrowsky never attacked the trust’s validity. She demanded that it be administered by its terms, and no penalty clause may punish that.

“Reversed and remanded.” Nothing is finally decided. The reformation counterclaim waits for the new record, the extrinsic evidence comes in this time, and Judy may still lose. The trust was signed in 2007, the suit was filed in 2020, and the meaning of its central phrase is still an open question.

What this would look like in Florida

Here is the detail that should stop a Florida reader. The trial judge’s reading, the one that creates the black hole, is the reading Florida authority supports. We ran our own sweep of Florida appellate decisions on August 19, 2026, and every decision we located that uses the phrase treats “joint lives” as the season while all the named people are alive, ending at the first death. The pattern holds across four separate corners of Florida law.

In joint trusts, the Fifth District decided Beaumont’s Florida twin a quarter century ago. In Rollins v. Alvarez, Jose and Alleen Alvarez, another blended family, held a joint revocable trust whose 1996 amendment required any change to be “signed by both of us” and barred amendment entirely after the first death. In 1998 Jose alone signed a restated trust disinheriting Alleen’s sons, prepared by a law firm that did not know the 1996 document existed. It failed. “Any amendment or modification of the 1996 trust had to be accomplished by a written document signed by both himself and Alleen, during their joint lifetimes.” And the court named the real failure point, the drafting file nobody checked. “No doubt counsel who prepared the 1998 trust would have also attempted to revoke and amend the 1996 trust as they did the 1993 trust, had they been aware of its existence.”

In joint wills, the Third District, adopting a New York court’s formulation, described the reciprocal promises as “revocable by either during their joint lives by the giving of notice to the other, becoming a fixed obligation upon the death of either one without such notice.” In tenancy by the entireties, the Fourth District recently repeated the Florida Supreme Court’s rule, first stated in 1930, that entireties property “cannot ordinarily be partitioned during their joint lives.” And in joint bank accounts, the First District measured a claimed gift by whether the parties held “an equal right to withdraw the funds during their joint lifetimes.” Trusts, wills, marital property, bank accounts. Same phrase, same clock, stopped by the first death every time.

Florida drafting also shows the fix, and it is five words long. When a Florida court needed an arrangement to reach the second death, the full formula appears. In O’Berry v. Gray, a couple was to remain on their land “during their joint lives and the life of the survivor,” under an option agreement exercisable “upon the death of the survivor of us.” The tail carries the arrangement past the first death. It was the only decision our sweep found using the full formula, which suggests drafters write it when they mean it. The Beaumont drafter wrote the front half four times and never once wrote the tail.

Retirement law solved the same problem decades ago, in the name of the product. Under federal pension law, a married worker’s benefit must by default be paid as a qualified joint and survivor annuity, an annuity that runs while both spouses are alive, plus a survivor annuity for the spouse who remains, set by federal law at no less than half of the joint-lives amount. The name answers both seasons. Joint covers the years both are alive, survivor covers the years after the first death, and nobody in the annuity world writes joint lives and stops, because the product’s own name would expose the gap. The Beaumont trust is an annuity clause missing its second half, and O’Berry’s formula is the same repair in property-law clothing.

Had this fight landed in a Florida courtroom, the toolkit would differ too. Different tools, not a promised outcome, and nothing here predicts how any judge would rule.

Start with reformation. Florida’s trust code allows a court to reform a trust “even if unambiguous,” on clear and convincing proof of a mistake of fact or law “whether in expression or inducement,” and the court “may consider evidence relevant to the settlor’s intent even though the evidence contradicts an apparent plain meaning of the trust instrument.” The threshold battle Beaumont spent an entire appeal winning, whether the document is ambiguous enough to let the evidence in, does not exist in a Florida reformation claim. The limits are real, as we wrote in the entry about the missing second witness, because reformation reaches wrong words and never a defective signing. Our annotation of Florida’s trust reformation statute collects the cases on both sides of that line.

The dead settlor’s voice has a statutory path as well. Florida’s evidence code admits statements of a declarant’s “then-existing state of mind,” including statements of “intent, plan, motive, design,” the same family of exception the Oregon court applied to Judy’s blocked testimony.

The penalty-clause front would never open at all. Florida law voids trust penalty clauses outright. “A provision in a trust instrument purporting to penalize any interested person for contesting the trust instrument or instituting other proceedings relating to a trust estate or trust assets is unenforceable.” Oregon validates them within limits and litigated the limits for pages. In Florida that entire dispute is unavailable.

And trustee removal runs through Florida’s own statutory grounds, including a “serious breach of trust” and a trustee’s “unfitness, unwillingness, or persistent failure” to administer the trust effectively. Beaumont’s closing logic travels well, since whether a withdrawal is a breach depends on what the instrument means, and a removal built on a contested reading is provisional until the reading is settled. If that fight is forming in your family, our Florida trust litigation guide shows how these cases are built.

What it teaches

The phrase was never exotic. The architecture failed. Every Florida decision in our sweep uses “joint lives” the way the Oregon trial judge read it. The wreck came from recycling a first-death phrase into the purpose clause and the only distribution article of a trust that had no article for the survivor’s years. Boilerplate is safe in the slot it was written for and dangerous everywhere else.

Five words at the drafting table, or six years in court. Writing “and the life of the survivor” costs nothing, and the formula has been sitting in Florida’s reporters since at least 1987, doing exactly this job. When an arrangement should outlive the first spouse, the tail has to be written, because no court can enforce a sentence that is not there. It can only preside over the fight about the gap.

A joint trust has three seasons, and all three belong on paper. Both spouses alive. One alive. Neither. The joint-trust fights that ended cleanly in other states involved instruments that spelled out the survivor’s period, often as a survivor’s trust switching on at the first death. The ones that consumed years left that season blank. The stakes double in a blended family, where the survivor and the late spouse’s children carry different memories of what was promised, as in Beaumont and Rollins both. Our guides to the Florida revocable living trust and the Florida community property trust show what a written survivor’s period looks like, and if your joint trust has not been read since it was signed, start with amendment versus restatement.

We draft joint trusts with all three seasons named, and we read older ones looking for the missing article, because finding the gap in a conference room costs an afternoon and finding it in court has taken the Beaumont family six years so far. Bring your trust to a free 30-minute consult and we will look for the two words together.

The case. Dombrowsky and Beaumont (In the Matter of The Beaumont Family Trust of February 9, 2007), 350 Or. App. 92 (Or. Ct. App. May 28, 2026). The Court of Appeals reversed and remanded so the trial court can decide, with the evidence admitted this time, what “joint lives” means. Nothing about the trust is finally decided, and the surviving spouse may yet lose. It is an Oregon decision applying Oregon law, persuasive at most in a Florida court. Quotations are from the court’s published opinion, including the trust language and testimony it reproduces, and from the Florida authorities listed below. The parties were not clients of this firm, and every case turns on its own facts.

Sources. The Florida authorities discussed above, with retrieval notes.

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.

Questions about your situation?

Book a free 30-minute consult. Flat fees, plain answers, no pressure.

Book your free consult