Daughters Did Not Defeat Winning Attorney’s Judgment.
In Estate of Goldstein, Case No. A137103 (1st Dist., Div. 2 May 23, 2014) (unpublished), attorney Dacey had obtained a $7.6 million judgment against the estate of his former partner for fee work which Dacey did while in partnership with his former partner. He collected $2.2 million from accounts in the estate. Current other accounts contained about $5.1 million, but daughters of the deceased partner claimed $3 million should be given to them because their deceased mother (wife of deceased former partner) had assigned and gifted the moneys to them as her community property while wife was alive. The probate court rejected the daughter’s claims.
The appellate court found this result to be correct. First of all, mother’s community property was liable for the debts of her deceased husband (with one of them being Dacey’s judgment). See Fam. Code, § 910; Prob. Code, § 13550. Had daughters truly wanted to obtain the urged result, mother and the estate’s representative could have asked the probate court to allocate the debt exclusively to husband’s estate pursuant to Probate Code section 11440, something not done. Second, daughter’s argument that Dacey was foreclosed because he failed to file a creditor’s claim did not gain traction. The reason was that there is an apt exception codified in Probate Code section 13552(c), with Dacey filing a claim in the actual probate court administration proceedings and the administrator failing to raise the creditor’s claim objection as a defense. Last, daughters argued that res judicata/claim splitting defeated Dacey’s claim, but both courts found that not to be correct because it was daughters, not Dacey, who brought the second proceeding. The opinion has a nice discussion of collateral estoppel/res judicata, especially with regarding to post-judgment collection efforts.