Florida Trust Litigation Attorney

The Moment You Realize the Trustee Is the Problem

It rarely announces itself. A parent dies, a sibling or a stepparent takes over as trustee, and for a while the delays sound reasonable. Then the pattern sets in. Questions go unanswered, the promised accounting never arrives, the distributions stay perpetually around the corner, and every request for information is treated as an attack. By the time most beneficiaries call a lawyer, the silence has been running for a year.

Here is the reframe that matters. A trustee is not an owner. The trustee holds the money for you and the other beneficiaries, under duties Florida law spells out and courts enforce. Trust litigation is the practice of enforcing those duties, forcing the accounting, compelling or correcting distributions, removing the trustee who cannot or will not do the job, and, when the trust itself was the product of pressure or slipped capacity, unwinding it. This page covers the trustee fights in depth; the broader world of will contests, undue influence, and estate disputes lives on our estate and trust litigation page.

What a Trustee Owes You

Florida’s Trust Code puts real obligations on every trustee. The trustee must administer the trust in good faith, stay loyal to the beneficiaries rather than to himself, act impartially when there is more than one beneficiary, and manage the property with the care and skill of a prudent person. Those words carry consequences. Self-dealing, favoritism toward one side of the family, and sloppy or self-serving management are not personality flaws, they are breaches a court can remedy.

The duties also cover information, which is where most fights begin. A trustee must keep qualified beneficiaries reasonably informed. When a revocable trust becomes irrevocable, usually at the creator’s death, the trustee has 60 days to notify beneficiaries that the trust exists, who the trustee is, and that they may request the trust document and accountings. Beneficiaries are entitled to a complete copy of the trust and to accountings, at least annually, showing the assets, the transactions, and what the trustee paid himself. Our trust beneficiary rights guide walks through these entitlements in detail. The short version is blunt. If you are being kept in the dark, the darkness itself is usually a violation.

The Trustee Refuses to Give an Accounting

One threshold question decides whether any of this applies to you yet. If the settlor is alive and the trust is still revocable, the trustee's duties run to the settlor alone, as our guide to Florida Statute 736.0603 explains. Once the trust becomes irrevocable, usually at death, the accounting right switches on and the sequence below is yours. What the trustee then owes you, and what a real accounting has to contain, are set out in Florida Statute 736.0813; the clock that starts when one arrives is Florida Statute 736.1008.

This is the most common opening move we see, and it has a well-worn answer. The sequence runs in three steps, each one building the record for the next. First, a written request for the trust document and an accounting, polite and dated. Second, a formal demand from counsel, laying out the trustee’s duties and a deadline. Third, a petition asking the court to compel the accounting. Judges grant these. A trustee has no legal ground to keep the books closed to the people the money belongs to, and a trustee who forces a court order to do the basics has already told the judge something about how the rest of the case will go.

Two things are worth knowing while you wait out the silence. Refusing to account does not buy the trustee time in the way people fear. Florida law says that knowing you have not received an accounting does not start any limitations clock against you on that failure, so the stonewall does not quietly expire your claim. And the accounting, once it arrives, is usually the whole ballgame. It either shows an honest administration behind a bad communicator, which is a relief worth having, or it shows the fees, the transfers, and the favoritism in black and white, which becomes the evidence for everything that follows. If you are on the other side of this, serving as a trustee and behind on the paperwork, our trust administration guide covers how to get compliant before it becomes a case.

The Trustee Will Not Distribute

Start with the honest half. A trustee is sometimes right to wait. Debts, taxes, and creditor exposure get resolved before beneficiaries get paid, and a trustee who distributes too early can be personally liable for it. A stalled distribution in the first months after a death is often prudence, not misconduct, and we will tell you when that is what we see.

But discretion has a floor. Many trusts give the trustee discretion over distributions, sometimes in sweeping language, sole discretion, absolute discretion, uncontrolled discretion. Florida law says that language is not a force field. However broad the words, the trustee must exercise the discretion in good faith, consistent with the trust’s terms and purposes and the interests of the beneficiaries. A court will not second-guess a judgment call merely because the judge would have decided differently, so these cases are not about disagreement. They are about bad faith, favoritism, self-interest, or a trustee ignoring what the trust actually says. Some trusts leave less discretion than the trustee thinks. When a trust gives a surviving spouse the income for life and says nothing about timing, Florida law requires the income to be paid out at least annually.

When the line is crossed, the remedies are concrete. A court can compel the trustee to perform, and where a breach left a beneficiary with no distribution or one that was too small, the court can order money paid from the trust to restore that beneficiary to the position the trust intended. Pair that with the accounting and, where warranted, removal, and the trustee who spent two years saying next month tends to find a schedule.

Removing a Trustee: What It Actually Takes

Removal is the remedy everyone asks about first, so here is the straight version. A settlor, a cotrustee, or a beneficiary can ask the court to remove a trustee, and the court can even act on its own. Florida law recognizes several grounds. A serious breach of trust; cotrustees whose conflict is paralyzing the administration; unfitness, unwillingness, or a persistent failure to administer the trust effectively, where removal serves the beneficiaries’ interests; or a substantial change of circumstances, including all qualified beneficiaries asking together, where removal serves everyone’s interests, does not defeat a core purpose of the trust, and a suitable replacement is available.

Notice what is not on the list, namely friction. Courts do not swap trustees because the family is angry, so a removal case is built, not declared. The building blocks are usually the accounting evidence, the paper trail of demands and silence, and the pattern of self-dealing or neglect the documents reveal. What makes removal litigation powerful in Florida is the interim relief. While the case runs, the court can suspend the trustee, appoint a special fiduciary to take possession of the trust property, freeze the conduct doing the damage, and reduce or deny the trustee’s compensation. The fight often turns the day control changes hands, months before any final ruling. Our annotated guide to Florida Statute 736.0706 walks the four grounds with the decisions applying them, including the one ground Florida's appellate courts have never defined.

Contesting the Trust Itself

Sometimes the problem is not how the trust is being run but how it came to exist. A parent’s longtime plan gets replaced in the final months by a new trust or amendment favoring one caregiver or one child; the signing happened in isolation; the lawyer was a stranger the beneficiary found. The same grounds that unseat a will can unseat a trust, meaning undue influence, lack of capacity, fraud, or a document that was never validly executed or amended. Florida measures the capacity to create or amend a revocable trust by the same standard as a will, and the burden-shifting framework that powers undue influence cases is covered on our estate and trust litigation page, because these contests usually travel together with the will fight over the same estate.

One trust-specific trap deserves its own sentence. Once the trustee sends you a copy of the trust instrument with a notice of the trust’s existence and your time to act, the window to contest a revocable trust’s validity can close six months later. That mailing tends to arrive while a family is still grieving and assuming there is time. If a surviving spouse has been written out, a Florida elective share claim may run alongside the contest, because Florida gives a spouse a protected share that a trust cannot simply draft away.

The Deadlines That Kill Cases

Trust litigation deadlines are short, specific, and start quietly. Here are the ones that do the most damage.

• Six months to object after a proper accounting. If the trustee gives you an adequate trust disclosure with the required limitation notice, claims based on what it disclosed can be barred six months after you receive it. The clock starts when the envelope arrives, not when you read it.
• Six months to contest the trust after the notice mailing. An action challenging the validity of a revocable trust can be barred six months after the trustee sends you the trust instrument with the statutory notice. Without the notice, the general limitations law still runs. We walk through the statute and what courts have said about it on our guide to the trust contest deadline.
• The will-side clocks run in parallel. When a probate estate is open alongside the trust, the window to object to the will can be as short as 90 days after formal notice, as our estate disputes page explains, and a probate administration proceeds on its own schedule whether or not the trust fight is resolved.
• Other breach claims carry multi-year limits that generally begin once a matter is adequately disclosed to you, which is one more reason every accounting deserves a prompt legal read.

The honest flip side is this. Stonewalling does not accelerate anything against you, since a clock generally needs disclosure to start, and the failure to account is not excused by time. But evidence fades either way. Accounts get closed, memories soften, and money in motion gets harder to trace. Deadlines aside, the practical clock always favors the beneficiary who moves. We followed one of these all the way through in the accountings that never came, where a trustee prepared not one accounting in all the years she served and the beneficiary who finally sued was held to a four-year look back anyway.

Red Flags That Mean Stop and Call a Lawyer

Some trust problems can simmer safely. These five cannot, and each is a trap we regularly see beneficiaries walk into alone.

• The clock arrived inside an envelope. A thick accounting with a formal limitation notice, or a copy of the trust with a notice about your time to act, is not routine mail. Each can start a six-month fuse. Have a lawyer read it the week it arrives, not the month after.
• The trustee’s lawyer is not your lawyer. The attorney advising the trustee represents the trustee, and Florida law extends the fiduciary lawyer-client privilege to their communications; the statutory notice beneficiaries receive says so on its face. Beneficiaries who spend months confiding in the trust’s counsel have been briefing the other side. Get your own advice the day your interests diverge.
• Trust money is funding the defense against you. A trustee can often pay lawyers from trust assets, but in a breach of trust fight Florida requires the trustee to serve a written notice of intent first, and a court can prohibit the payments or order them returned with interest on a showing that a breach likely occurred. Miss this lever and you can end up financing both sides of your own case.
• You are tempted to grab your own evidence. Logging into the trustee’s email, recording calls without consent, or letting yourself into a property the trustee controls can violate state and federal law and hand the trustee a counterclaim. The lawful pipeline, an accounting demand the court will enforce and discovery once suit is filed, reaches everything you need.
• The money is moving now. Property being retitled, accounts being drained, a trustee borrowing against trust assets. These do not wait for a convenient month, and courts can suspend a trustee or seat a special fiduciary faster than most people expect. If an elderly settlor is being exploited while still alive, a vulnerable adult injunction can freeze the accounts within days.

What Trust Litigation Costs

Trust litigation is not flat-fee work, because no two trustee fights follow the same road. We quote it at the consult, after we see the documents and the amount at stake, and we tell you plainly whether the fight is worth having, including a candid read on whether the money is still findable and collectable. A meaningful share of these matters resolve at the demand and accounting stage, a modest engagement, because a trustee who receives a competent demand letter can count the cost of the alternative. Florida’s Trust Code also has its own rules on attorney fees in breach of trust cases. Courts award fees and costs and can direct that they be paid from a party’s share of the trust or entered as a personal judgment, which is leverage that cuts both ways and belongs in the strategy from day one. The 30-minute consult is free.

Frequently Asked Questions

Common Situations

The trustee sibling who went silent. A brother named as trustee stops responding after the first year. No accounting, no copy of the trust, distributions always coming soon, then nothing at all. A formal demand and a petition to compel force the books open. The accounting shows the trustee paying himself generous fees and lending trust money to his own business. The case resolves with the loans repaid, the fees disgorged, and an independent successor trustee in place.

The discretion that was really favoritism. A stepmother serving as trustee distributes steadily to her own children while telling her late husband’s children the trust gives her sole discretion and their share must wait. The accounting shows the pattern. Confronted with the good-faith limit on discretionary power and the court’s authority to restore shorted beneficiaries, the matter settles with equalizing distributions and a professional cotrustee added.

The six-month letter nobody read. A daughter suspects her father’s trust was rewritten under the influence of a new companion in his final year. The trustee’s notice packet, with a copy of the trust, sat unopened for four months. A prompt consult confirms the contest window is closing, the challenge is filed inside the six months, and the earlier trust is restored after the evidence of isolation and dependence comes out. Two more months in the drawer and the claim would have died regardless of its merits.

Sources of Law

• Fla. Stat. §§736.0801 to 736.0804 (trustee duties: good-faith administration, loyalty, impartiality, prudent administration); §736.0813 (duty to inform and account; 60-day notices; the notice’s statement that the fiduciary lawyer-client privilege in §90.5021 applies to the trustee and the trustee’s attorney; accountings at least annually); §736.08135 (trust accounting content). flsenate.gov (retrieved 2026-08-11)
• Fla. Stat. §736.0814(1) (discretionary powers, including those labeled “absolute,” “sole,” or “uncontrolled,” must be exercised in good faith and in accordance with the trust’s terms, purposes, and the beneficiaries’ interests; no abuse found merely because the court would have exercised the discretion differently); §736.08147 (income to a spouse distributed no less frequently than annually where the instrument is silent). (retrieved 2026-08-11)
• Fla. Stat. §736.0706 (removal of trustee: request by settlor, cotrustee, or beneficiary, or the court’s own initiative; grounds including serious breach, cotrustee non-cooperation, and unfitness, unwillingness, or persistent failure to administer effectively; interim relief pending removal). (retrieved 2026-08-11)
• Fla. Stat. §736.1001 (remedies for breach of trust: compel performance, enjoin, order an accounting, appoint a special fiduciary, suspend or remove the trustee, reduce or deny compensation, void acts, trace and recover property, and restore beneficiaries whose distributions were skipped or too small); §736.1002 (damages: the greater of restoration, including lost income and appreciation, or the trustee’s profit). (retrieved 2026-08-11)
• Fla. Stat. §736.1008 (limitations on proceedings against trustees: the 6-month bar after a trust disclosure document with a limitation notice; non-receipt of an accounting does not commence a limitations period on the failure to account); §736.0604 (action contesting the validity of a revocable trust barred at the earlier of the chapter 95 period or 6 months after the trustee sends the trust instrument and statutory notice); §736.0601 (capacity to create or amend a revocable trust is the same as for a will); §733.212 (probate notice of administration; objection window as short as 90 days). (retrieved 2026-08-11)
• Fla. Stat. §736.0802(10) (trustee payment of attorney fees from trust assets in breach of trust proceedings: written notice of intent to affected qualified beneficiaries; court may prohibit payment or compel return with interest upon a reasonable basis to conclude a breach occurred; sanctions including striking defenses); §736.1004 (attorney fees and costs in actions for breach of fiduciary duty or challenging the exercise of a trustee’s powers, payable from a party’s interest in the trust or as a judgment). (retrieved 2026-08-11)

Updated on August 19, 2026. 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. General information about Florida law, not legal advice, and no attorney-client relationship is created. Deadlines and outcomes depend on the specific facts; past results do not guarantee a similar outcome. Do not send confidential information until we have agreed to represent you.