When the Trustee is Keeping a Trust Beneficiary in the Dark 

**Video Transcript **
Hi this is Keith Davidson at Albertson & Davidson. And today I want to talk to you about being kept in the dark as a trust beneficiary. So, a lot of times, when people are trust beneficiaries, or if they they’re trust beneficiaries but they’re not sure, they may be kept in the dark. So the people who are in the know, the people who have the trust documents aren’t willing to hand them over, aren’t willing to share the information and they don’t want to talk to you. So what are you going to do about it?
And in most of our cases, you really can think of it as a two-step process. So we really don’t even know what your rights are or how good your case is until we get the information that we can use to evaluate those claims. But to get that information, you have to file in court, which you can do as either a beneficiary or an heir at law. Even if you’re disinherited, you have the right to those documents. You can file a petition in court and you can go after them and you can get a court order ordering that the documents be handed over to you. That’s step one.
Step two is looking at the documents that you receive and then you can make a basis of what type of claims do you have and how can you pursue this in court?
So you really have to look at these cases. If you’re a beneficiary who has been kept in the dark and you really don’t know anything about the trust or will and nobody will share that with you. It’s a two-step process. So you have to pay - the first step, just to get the information - and then the next step is to evaluate your claims.