One sentence, running both ways
A trustee shall take reasonable steps to enforce claims of the trust and to defend claims against the trust.
Section 736.0811, Florida Statutes. Enacted in 2006 and never amended since.
The symmetry is the point. A trustee can breach this by inaction in either direction, by failing to chase what the trust is owed or by failing to resist what is claimed from it. Both failures cost the beneficiaries the same way.
The enforcement half is where the practical damage usually happens, because it is silent. Nobody sends a notice when a claim is quietly allowed to lapse. Consider a loan the settlor made and nobody collected, a tenant who stopped paying, money a family member took years ago, or a professional whose advice cost the trust money. Each of these is a claim of the trust, and each is subject to a limitation period that runs whether or not the trustee is paying attention.
Why the duty has to sit on the trustee
There is a structural reason this section exists, and it is stated more clearly in an unlikely place than in any trust dispute. In 2025 a federal judge in Florida had to decide whose citizenship counted for diversity purposes when a trust sued a mosquito control district over aerial spraying. Answering it required saying what a trust actually is.
Under Florida law, a trust is not a “distinct juridical entity,” but rather makes and defends claims via its trustee.
Cassidy v. Citrus County Mosquito Control District, No. 5:25-cv-00043 (M.D. Fla. Apr. 8, 2025), an order granting a motion to dismiss. A trial level federal order with no reporter citation, and not binding authority.
The court cited this section in support. That is worth understanding for what it is. The case has nothing to do with trustee duties, and the citation is incidental to a jurisdictional question. But the proposition it rests on is correct and rarely said out loud. A trust is not a legal person. It cannot hold a cause of action in its own name or appear in court. Everything it is owed and everything claimed against it must move through the trustee, which is precisely why the Legislature made pursuing and defending claims a duty rather than a discretion.
The Florida decision
The only Florida appellate decision citing this section is Prewitt v. Kimmons, where the Fifth District reversed summary judgment against a beneficiary on a breach of fiduciary duty claim. The court set out the duties in a single citation.
See § 736.0801, Fla. Stat. (2013) (“[T]he trustee shall administer the trust in good faith, in accordance with its terms . . . .”); id. § 736.0811 (“A trustee shall take reasonable steps to enforce claims of the trust . . . .”); id. § 736.0812 (“A trustee shall take reasonable steps to compel a former trustee or other person to deliver trust property to the trustee . . . .”).
Prewitt v. Kimmons, 237 So. 3d 1158 (Fla. 5th DCA 2018). The opinion carries the legend “NOT FINAL UNTIL TIME EXPIRES TO FILE MOTION FOR REHEARING AND DISPOSITION THEREOF IF FILED.”
The allegation this supported was that the trustee had failed to seek the return of $10,000 held by another party. That was enough, with the rest of the claim, to leave questions of fact for trial and to reverse the summary judgment.
Note what the court did not do. It quoted the section and did not interpret it. There is no discussion of what reasonable steps requires, no threshold below which a claim may be ignored, and no guidance on how a trustee should weigh the cost of pursuing a claim against its likely recovery. The case establishes that failing to pursue money owed to the trust can support a breach claim. It goes no further.
What no court has decided
The phrase reasonable steps appears in this section and in section 736.0812 and has been quoted by Florida courts without ever being defined. So the questions that decide real cases are open.
Whether a trustee must file suit or may stop at a demand. Whether a trustee can reasonably decline to pursue a claim that would cost more to litigate than it would recover, which would sit naturally alongside the proportionality rule in section 736.0805 but has no authority behind it here. Whether a beneficiary can compel the trustee to act, or must instead sue the trustee for the loss after the claim is gone. And whether a trustee who allows a limitation period to expire is liable for the full value of the lost claim or only for the chance of recovering it.