The Great Wealth Transfer and the Coming Wave of Probate Litigation: Contested Estates, Fiduciary Claims, and Heirs’ Property Disputes Through 2040

Brittany Kaczmarczyk is an associate in Reminger Co., LPA’s Cleveland and Akron offices, where she focuses her practice on estates, trusts, probate litigation, and guardianship. She represents clients in the pursuit and defense of trust and will contests, power of attorney abuse, declaratory judgments to invalidate financial or real estate transactions, fiduciary liability, and breach of trust. Brittany counsels clients through all phases of the probate litigation process, including factual investigation, pleadings, discovery, motion practice, mediation, evidentiary hearings, and trial. Beyond litigation, she handles estate and trust administration and assists clients in applying for, as well as personally serving as, guardian. She has reviewed hundreds of thousands of pages of documents, researched complex issues of law, developed case strategies, and obtained results for her clients through motion practice, mediation, and trial.

Michael Brody is an associate in Reminger’s Cleveland office, where he focuses his practice primarily on litigating private and family wealth disputes arising from wills, trusts, power of attorney and fiduciary misconduct, and non-probate transfers of assets. He also assists clients with estate and trust planning and administration and provides guardianship services. Recognizing that estate and trust disputes often involve heightened emotions and unique family dynamics alongside their inherent economic considerations, Michael works closely to understand these factors so he can counsel clients effectively and help them reach pragmatic, equitable solutions.

Stephen Crofford, Jr. serves as Vice President and Senior Fiduciary Counsel of Cumberland Trust, which he joined in 2016. In this role he reviews trust agreements and last wills and testaments from states across the country and drafts documents relating to the administration of trusts and estates. He provides counsel to Cumberland Trust on administrative questions that may arise and offers independent legal analysis of trusts, estates, and litigation matters. Stephen also has experience reviewing and preparing client documents and working with unique, illiquid, and hard-to-value assets held in trust.

Thomas E. (Tom) Simmons is a tenured professor at the University of South Dakota Knudson School of Law, where he holds the McDowell, King, & South Dakota Trust Company Chair in Trust and Estate Law. His teaching and scholarship concentrate on trusts, estates, probate, attorney ethics, fiduciaries, and the estate tax, and his courses include Trusts & Wills, Estate Planning, Professional Responsibility, Remedies, a pair of Tribal Wills Clinic practicum courses, and occasionally a seminar titled Holocaust Law. He serves as a Commissioner of the Uniform Law Commission and an Associate Justice on the Rosebud Sioux Tribe Supreme Court. He is also the author of three collections of poetry: Tod Browning Looseleaf Encyclopedia, S is for Sentence, and Soviets on Venus.

David Fowler Johnson is widely recognized as one of the go-to fiduciary litigators in Texas. His practice focuses on trust, estate, and closely held business disputes. A frequent writer and speaker, David is known around the state as a thought leader in the fiduciary area. His award-winning blog, The Fiduciary Litigator, features recent case law, legislative changes, and other precedent that impacts fiduciaries in Texas. Based in Winstead PC’s Fort Worth office, his work spans both contested litigation and a transactional practice serving trust departments.