|
|
TRUST & ESTATE DISPUTES MEDIATION
WORKS FOR FAMILIES AND SIBLINGS IN DISPUTE OVER INHERITED PROPERTY INCLUDING
SUMMER HOMES AND CHERISHED PERSONAL PROPETY
When parents pass away, it is not only often a painful experience emotionally,
but it also often brings about changed situations financially. It can
even be a situation of relief mixed with grief and guilt, when the parent
died after great suffering, or died when family conflicts were unresolved.
Property is often left to children in the form of real estate or stocks.
Primary homes and vacation homes are often left to grown children for
them to decide appropriate use and disposition. Specific personal property
distribution is often not addressed in wills in much detail. Family strife
often develops over how such property will be used, managed and distributed.
Mediation is an ideal forum for such matters. It allows siblings and their
spouses or significant others, or grandchildren if so chosen, to have
meaningful dialogue about the effects of the deaths and how they wish
to deal with and distribute inherited property in meaningful ways. Often
old family controversies, personality dynamics and differences, or sibling
rivalries that were never addressed years earlier emerge as obstacles.
Mediation offers an opportunity for all involved to overcome such barriers
by having a better understanding of each other, the situation, and to
focus and take part in informed decision making that all feel is fair
and workable. No mediation outcome is ever the same for all families.
Mediators help grown children with easier ways of relating to each other
while each works through his or her own acceptance of their parents’
deaths. Mediators often help families who have inherited property decide
how to use or co-own a summer home with shared rights and responsibilities
of ownership. Mediators often help families create the plan of personal
property distribution, which may also involve other family members many
miles away, or may include decisions about what other resources are needed
to provide valuations or to assist in the appropriate distribution. Rather
than being left with loss as well as bitterness, families choosing to
use mediation have a chance to move toward something more positive.
Trust and Estate lawyers also love mediation because the process allows
families to craft their own outcomes that could never have been envisioned
years prior when wills were created. Family members named in wills as
executors or administrators also welcome mediation, because they often
find themselves in situations where it is difficult to know or to please
all siblings with the handling of the estate after the parents have died
without a facilitated discussion. Mediators can prepare written summaries
of the decisions made in the mediation process as well as with property
plans. Trust and estate and other counsel can also assist families as
resources during and after the mediation process for other legal documents
that beneficiaries may need.
Mediators of Louise Phipps Senft & Associates/Baltimore Mediation
believe in Better Process…Better Outcome.
|
