The section
This part may be cited as the “Florida Uniform Directed Trust Act.”
Section 736.1401, Florida Statutes. Created by s. 14, ch. 2021-183.
The whole Part comes from a single 2021 act and took effect on July 1, 2021.
What the Act is for
Trust documents have contained protectors and advisers for decades. Someone who is not the trustee is given power to remove trustees, approve distributions, direct investments or amend the trust. Florida law had very little to say about that arrangement, and the gaps were the ones that matter. Who is a fiduciary, who is answerable for what, and what a trustee must do when told to do something it thinks is wrong.
The article on the Act written by the chair of its drafting committee describes the arrangement plainly.
Simply put, a directed trust is a trust in which a person other than a trustee has a power over some aspect of the trust’s administration.
Rubin and Rubin, The Florida Bar Journal, March/April 2022.
The article also sets out the questions the Act was written to answer.
With the increasing number of directed trusts came numerous legal questions which were not fully answered by existing Florida law. How is fiduciary responsibility allocated between the trust director and the trustee? How much information do the trust director and the trustee need to share with each other? Can a trust director receive compensation for its work?
Rubin and Rubin, The Florida Bar Journal, March/April 2022.
The Real Property, Probate and Trust Law Section of The Florida Bar sought a Florida version of the uniform act, and the Legislature enacted it as a discrete new Part rather than scattering it through the Code.
What it replaced
The predecessor was former section 736.0808, and the article’s assessment is blunt. It very narrowly addressed some of the issues that arose between trust directors and trustees, and there was little by way of caselaw interpreting these provisions.
The change was not cosmetic. Under the old provision a directed trustee could refuse a direction that was manifestly contrary to the terms of the trust, or that the trustee knew would be a serious breach of the director’s fiduciary duty. Under section 736.1409 the trustee’s only floor is its own willful misconduct, and the article describes that as a departure from the prior standard. Our page on that section sets out both tests.
The numbering, which is a research aid
Part XIV’s section numbers look irregular. There is a 736.1401 and a 736.1403 but no 736.1402; a 736.1405 but no 736.1404. The reason is recorded in the article.
The last two digits of each section number correspond to the source section of the uniform act.
Rubin and Rubin, The Florida Bar Journal, March/April 2022.
So 736.1403 is uniform act section 3, 736.1405 is section 5, and so on. Where Florida placed uniform act material somewhere else in the Trust Code, no Part XIV number was used. The definitions are the clearest example. They went into section 736.0103, which is why there is no 736.1402. The same act also amended section 736.0105(2)(b), section 736.1008 and section 736.1017 to fit the new regime.
One trap worth flagging, because we fell into it. There is no section 736.1410, but there is a section 736.141, with three digits after the decimal, covering the duty to provide information. It sits between 736.1409 and 736.1411. A search that assumes four digits will miss it entirely, and Part XV has the same feature at 736.151.
No court has cited any of this
Our review found no Florida decision citing this section, and none citing the substantive sections of the Part.
A nationwide search returns two documents, and neither is about Florida trusts. One is an Illinois appeal from 2006, fifteen years before the Act existed, where the match is a docket number ending 0736 sitting next to a statutory paragraph 1401. The other is a 2024 California decision where the matched text is a reference to two jury instruction numbers, 736 and 1401, printed together.
That second one is worth a note for anyone doing this kind of research. We have now seen the same failure several times. A search engine assembles a statute number out of two adjacent numbers separated by a comma. Previously it was reporter page numbers. Here it is jury instructions. The lesson generalises beyond citations.