Contact Lee and Wombacher for Family Law Advice Regarding Will Disputes

Will disputes are not an uncommon problem but can be a very troubling situation if they end up costing you or anyone in your family money that they deserve. Thankfully, the Law Offices of Lee and Wombacher can help manage these types of disputes and all other family law issues. Fully understanding the problems that may arise here can help to ensure that you get the best overall experience for your needs and cut back on the troubles that you may experience if your will or another one gets disputed by anyone in your family.

Doubt About the Legality of the Will

There are many situations in which the Law Offices of Lee and Wombacher can help when the legality of family law is in dispute. For instance, the concept of testamentary capacity states that only adults over the age of 18 can create a will, except in cases when an individual is joining the military. In this situation, a young person may be able to make a will just to be safe.

The trouble here is that some people may believe that the conditions of the will were influenced by outside factors, such as pressure from a parent or a romantic partner. This situation is often troubling because it may put the legal perspective of the will in doubt and make litigation much more likely. Even if the will was prepared legally and with the proper justification, it may still be disputed.

Thankfully, a good family law firm can help out by assessing the legality of the will and making sure that it meets all the standards necessary. Often, this process takes a look at the circumstances of the will, examines various elements of its creation, and attempts to gauge what kind of influence people may have had on the individual who made the will. In this way, its legality and binding nature can be assessed and properly understood.

New Wills Suddenly Appear

Though the cliché of the suddenly appearing will may seem like it would only happen in melodramas and bad novels, it happens a lot more than you may expect. For example, your father may have a will that you know the location of and which was prepared as a way to protect your family. However, there may be another will that he prepared after this first one – and if it is legally binding, it overrules the first will.

In most cases, a secondary will is usually just to clarify a few points or adjust income distribution slightly. For instance, you may have a new member of the family in a niece or nephew that your father decided he wanted to leave some of his money or property to after he passed. However, sudden and intensive changes in a will may cause disputes in those who are left out with no monetary compensation.

Disputing this type of will can be a very challenging experience – most courts will typically honor the new will if it was legally prepared and utilized all of the proper authorization channels. Challenges usually center on attempting to dispute the state of mind the person was in when they made the will or trying to argue undue influence. And these fights can be very hard because they may require a lot of evidence and careful preparation of your case with the family law specialists in the Law Offices of Lee and Wombacher.

Confusing Provisions

Many of the biggest issues that the Law Offices of Lee and Wombacher Family Law notice when they’re handling will disputes is confusion about the provisions of the will. If properly prepared, a good will should be very easy to understand with minimal confusion. However, some lawyers are better at writing wills than others and may create some confusion. When this happens, there’s a good chance that a dispute is on its way.

For instance, one provision of a will may split a person’s liquid finances up three ways but use inaccurate percentages to leave some money behind. So if three people each received 30 percent, there would be 10 percent unaccounted for in the will. That type of serious mistake will make a will confusing and cause a lot of troubling problems that may end up putting the will into a serious dispute and may even cause it to be invalidated in some courts.

Even worse, some provisions may directly contradict each other if the will was prepared over an extended period. For instance, an individual may grant two people ownership of their intellectual properties, which can create a very large and immediate dispute. Whatever the case in this scenario, you are going to have to make sure that you contact lawyers who can handle this dispute and make sure that it gets figured out to the proper legal extent.

Residency Complaints

Lastly, the Law Offices of Lee and Wombacher run into a lot of residency issues that seem like they’d be easy to manage but can be quite frustrating when not handled properly. These problems occur when an individual attempts to dispute a will because the individual who created it died in a state in which they did not have residency or where the will was not made. Such disputes are almost always distraction tactics and rarely go well for those making the claims.

That’s because most state laws claim that a will is legal as long as the individual who made the will had a legal residence in the state where they made the will. For example, if somebody made a will according to Michigan’s rules – where they have a permanent residence – but they do in California, their will is still legal. This fact is true even if they die in a state where their will would not be legal.

In the scenario above, this situation would play out if Michigan laws allowed for certain provisions that California law did not. Even though the will is not legal in California – a state where the deceased person spends a few months at a vacation home before they died – where the individual passed, the fact that it was made according to Michigan laws makes it perfectly legal. Complaints like these are often thrown out of many courts, though a lawyer may be necessary to help out here.

Help is Available for Your Needs

As you can see, figuring out will disputes isn’t necessarily a complex process if you fully understand what to expect. As long are you’re capable of handling the difficulties of these cases with your lawyer, you shouldn’t run into any concerns. Thankfully, we at Law Offices of Lee & Wombacher can help out here by providing you with the assistance that you need. We serve McHenry County, Illinois, and will give you the insight into your legal protection that is necessary to avoid long-term complications.