PROBATE, WILLS, & TRUSTS

Successfully mediated an action initiated in probate court involving competing claims over fractional ownership interests in a large parcel of prime agricultural land. The dispute began when the claimant was approached by a commercial real estate agent and informed that her father’s name (along with several others) was on the title to a plot of land that was in the process of being sold. The claimant, who never knew of her father’s interest in the land, filed a petition in probate court. Two objectors then filed objections to the petition, claiming that the claimant’s father sold his fractional interest in the plot of land over fifty years earlier as part of a larger land sale, despite the fact that the sale documents did not explicitly describe the plot at issue. They also claimed that, in the alternative, they and their families had occupied and used the land, and paid taxes on it, as owners for the past fifty years and had obtained title by adverse possession. Despite the case’s substantial historical and legal intricacies, it was settled at mediation prior to discover.