When a trustee, financial advisor, or other fiduciary stops acting in your interests, you might face consequences. Before we address disputes through litigation, we will identify your goals and see which common remedy matches them. Fiduciary litigation offers several remedies, including monetary damages.
Additionally, judges may remove fiduciaries from their roles and make them pay beneficiaries any profits from their misconduct. Litigation can help beneficiaries address many breaches of duty, from self-dealing to misappropriation of assets. Some cases take longer than others, and some go to trial while others settle through mediation. Our lawyers can identify your preferred outcome from the get-go and help you achieve it when you sue a fiduciary.
For help with your case, call the Heyman Law Firm’s fiduciary litigation attorneys today at (410) 305-9287.
What Remedies Are Available in Fiduciary Litigation?
You can get compensatory damages or seek specific remedies through fiduciary litigation, like removal of the fiduciary. We can explain which remedies are most likely in your case and help you achieve them.
Monetary Damages
Fiduciaries must act in the beneficiaries’ best interests, not their own. Failure often leads to damages for beneficiaries. Selling estate assets for lesser value or funneling cash to personal bank accounts affects distributions and trust or estate value. Breaches from financial advisors also have monetary consequences.
Let our lawyers estimate your damages from the breach of fiduciary duty. We may need to get appraisals, compare market prices, review account statements, enlist financial experts to calculate monetary damages.
Equitable Remedies
Equitable remedies help ensure a fiduciary’s misconduct doesn’t continue. The court may remove the fiduciary from their position and appoint a successor. If the fiduciary made any profits from their breach of duty, the court may order “disgorgement.” This makes a fiduciary to give any profits to beneficiaries.
Courts can order fiduciaries to return any assets or cash they took. Judges can also compel or stop other actions through injunctions when beneficiaries file lawsuits.
Can You Remedy Fiduciary Disputes without Going to Trial?
Our lawyers can help you remedy a fiduciary dispute, which may or may not involve a trial. We may settle matters out of court through mediation, which the judge assigned to your case may require.
Mediation is an “alternative dispute resolution method.” Rather than going to trial right away, both sides sit with a mediator to negotiate terms. The mediator is an independent third party, typically appointed by the court. The mediator exists to facilitate negotiations, but they do not make any decisions. They cannot compel you to remedy the fiduciary dispute out of court.
The fiduciary may want to resolve the dispute out of court. Mediation keeps the dispute and the remedy private, which helps with estate issues between relatives.
Contact our experienced lawyers to effectively remedy a fiduciary dispute. We know the legal duty fiduciaries owe beneficiaries and the common signs they breached that duty. Our fiduciary litigation attorneys can help gather evidence of conflicts of interest, misappropriation of assets, or self-dealing. We can also help you identify your litigation goals, such as getting a trustee removed or recovering losses from devalued trust assets.
What Fiduciary Breaches Can Litigation Remedy?
Lawsuits can help address many breaches of fiduciary duty. It can be hard to determine if a financial advisor, trustee, or estate executor is abusing their role. We can review accounts, correspondence, and other information to determine whether a breach occurred and help you pursue litigation.
Some of the most common breaches of fiduciary duty that litigation helps remedy include failure to distribute assets, favoring specific beneficiaries, bad recordkeeping, mismanagement of assets, and conflicts of interest.
Other duty breaches include making unauthorized transactions from trusts or investment accounts, selling trust assets to themselves, and not following account instructions.
Although the fiduciary owes you the duty, they might ignore your attempts to communicate or get more information. They may not easily step back from their role, restore the account’s value, or otherwise pay you what you’re due without you filing a lawsuit and involving our lawyers.
How Long Does it Take to Resolve Fiduciary Disputes with Litigation?
Some fiduciary disputes are more complex than others, involving many beneficiaries, years of accounting documents, and countless pieces of correspondence. Based on your goals and your case, we can estimate how long it may take.
Mediation might be quick if the fiduciary also wants to resolve the issue as soon as possible. If they refuse to budge on certain matters, like not leaving their position as a trustee, we may have to go to trial so the judge can remove them.
While many beneficiaries want to avoid trials for fiduciary litigation, lengthy mediation might let the fiduciary continue abusing their role. Lawsuits may not take long, so don’t be averse to going to court. Our lawyers may advise a trial to get you the utmost damages.
How Can I Get My Preferred Outcome from Fiduciary Litigation?
To get your preferred outcome from fiduciary litigation, you need evidence of the fiduciary’s breach of duty. Accounting reports, bank statements, and correspondence are good evidence, and we can organize it for your case.
We can also represent your interests throughout mediation or a trial, asserting your rights as a beneficiary. We will determine the right filing deadline for your case, which could be as soon as one year from when you are notified of a potential claim. A trustee might send notice in an accounting report, for example, and you would have a year from then to file. Otherwise, you have three years to sue. That is still not long, so prioritize your case and contact our lawyers immediately if you suspect a breach of trust.
Call Us to Talk About a Fiduciary Dispute
Call the Heyman Law Firm’s fiduciary litigation attorneys about your case today at (410) 305-9287.