The statute asks two questions, and you have to answer both
Section 736.0415 has never been amended. The Legislature enacted it in 2006 and it took effect on July 1, 2007, and the words have not changed since. Every decision discussed on this page construes the same sentence.
Upon application of a settlor or any interested person, the court may reform the terms of a trust, even if unambiguous, to conform the terms to the settlor’s intent if it is proved by clear and convincing evidence that both the accomplishment of the settlor’s intent and the terms of the trust were affected by a mistake of fact or law, whether in expression or inducement. In determining the settlor’s original intent, the court may consider evidence relevant to the settlor’s intent even though the evidence contradicts an apparent plain meaning of the trust instrument.
Section 736.0415, Florida Statutes.
Read that once more and notice the word both. The mistake must have affected the accomplishment of the settlor’s intent and the terms of the trust. That conjunction has decided more of these cases than any other feature of the statute, and it is where the Second District placed its emphasis in 2025.
Because section 736.0415 provides courts with the authority to ‘reform the terms of a trust . . . to conform the terms to the settlor’s intent,’ id., any need to do so presupposes that the terms of the trust do not conform to the settlor’s intent in the first place.
McGee v. McGee, No. 2D2024-1447 (Fla. 2d DCA Aug. 15, 2025). This opinion carries the legend “Opinion subject to revision prior to official publication” and no reporter citation had issued when we reviewed it.
What counts as a mistake is broad
The leading case on the statute’s reach is Megiel-Rollo v. Megiel. A settlor signed a trust that referred to a separate schedule naming the remainder beneficiaries, and the schedule was never prepared. The trust therefore designated nobody. The circuit court concluded that no valid trust had ever come into existence and that there was accordingly nothing to reform. The Second District disagreed and sent the case to trial.
The statute provides that reformation of the terms of a trust is available ‘if it is proved by clear and convincing evidence that both the accomplishment of the settlor’s intent and the terms of the trust were affected by a mistake of fact or law, whether in expression or inducement.’ (Emphasis added.) It is beyond argument that the statutory reference to ‘a mistake of fact or law’ is not limited by any qualifiers.
Our conclusion finds additional support in the status of section 736.0415 as a remedial statute.
Megiel-Rollo v. Megiel, 162 So. 3d 1088 (Fla. 2d DCA 2015).
So a drafting failure severe enough to leave a trust with no remainder beneficiaries at all is still a mistake the statute can reach. That is a long way from the scrivener’s typo people usually picture.
Three things reformation will not do
It will not cure a defective signing. In Kelly v. Lindenau a second amendment left a house to a friend of the settlor. The amendment was not witnessed by two people as section 736.0403(2)(b) requires. The trial court reformed it anyway. The Second District reversed.
Aside from the issue of the settlor’s intent, the statute thus focuses on the terms of the trust, not the execution of it.
But here, the terms of the second amendment are clear that Ralph intended to leave the Bradenton house to Lindenau. Thus there were no terms of the trust that needed reformation.
Kelly v. Lindenau, 223 So. 3d 1074 (Fla. 2d DCA 2017), rehearing denied July 17, 2017.
The point is worth sitting with, because it is counterintuitive. The settlor’s intent was not in doubt. Everyone agreed what he wanted. He simply did not sign in front of enough people, and reformation could not reach that.
It will not update a trust for events the settlor did not foresee. In Morey v. Everbank a trustee argued that the settlor would have directed life insurance proceeds differently had he known how his finances would deteriorate. The First District affirmed the denial.
Reformation is not available to modify the terms of a trust to effectuate what the settlor would have done differently had the settlor foreseen a change of circumstances that occurred after the instruments were executed.
Morey v. Everbank, 93 So. 3d 482 (Fla. 1st DCA 2012).
It will not do anything where the terms already match the intent. That is McGee. The settlor made a new trust in 2021 and never retitled his assets into it. The trial court reformed the 2021 trust into a restatement of his 2014 trust. The Second District reversed with directions to deny reformation. The failure to fund was not a mistake in the terms, and the terms said what he meant them to say.
The trial court erred by applying section 736.0415 to reform the 2021 Trust, the terms of which conformed to the settlor’s intent.
McGee v. McGee, No. 2D2024-1447 (Fla. 2d DCA Aug. 15, 2025).
Who can bring the claim
The statute says a settlor or any interested person. It does not name trustees, and a trustee whose own drafting is under attack is in an awkward position. The Third District settled it early, the year after the statute took effect.
For these reasons, we reject the general notion that a trustee lacks the standing to seek reformation of a trust either before or after enactment of section 736.0415.
Reid v. Temple Judea, 994 So. 2d 1146 (Fla. 3d DCA 2008).
That court reached its conclusion partly through the statute’s legislative history, quoting a Senate staff analysis and the Ad Hoc Trust Code Revision Committee’s summary. Those are materials the court relied on rather than the court’s own holding, and we flag the distinction because the staff analysis contains a sentence often repeated as though a court had written it, namely that the section is broader than prior Florida case law because it allows reformation for mistakes both in the expression and in the inducement.
Clear and convincing evidence, and a warning about how this case ended
Reid v. Temple Judea sent the reformation claim back for trial. The claimant lost that trial, and in 2011 the Third District affirmed the denial in Reid v. Estate of Sonder. The majority disposed of the statute in a single citation, holding that the party seeking reformation always bears the burden of proving by clear and convincing evidence that the trust as written does not reflect the settlor’s intent.
We flag something about that decision because anyone researching this statute will run into it. Almost every quotable passage about section 736.0415 in Reid v. Estate of Sonder appears in Judge Wells’s partial dissent, which argued the majority’s reasoning rendered the statute superfluous and would have granted reformation. A dissent is not the law. We mention it only because the same judge had written the majority opinion in the earlier appeal that established the trustee’s standing, and then disagreed with the panel on the merits three years later.
The practical lesson from the pair of decisions is that winning the right to bring a reformation claim and winning the claim are different things, separated here by a trial and by a standard of proof that an appellate court will not revisit lightly.
For the other side of the coin, a reformation that carried the clear-and-convincing burden and survived every level of appeal, see our case story on the Idaho family whose 1970 trust said "male child" where the family meant everyone. The winning evidence there was a routine affidavit signed decades earlier for an unrelated purpose, the strongest argument this statute offers for putting a settlor’s intent in writing while everyone is alive.