$7,500 Fee Award Out of Requested $36,000 In Fees Sustained On Appeal.
Here is one showing how lower courts will balance the interests of trustees and trust remainder beneficiaries when crafting fee awards. (Boy, these terms take us back to law school probate classes, don’t they?)
In Clare v. MacCarley, Case No. B223107 (2d Dist., Div. 5 Jan. 10, 2011) (unpublished), attorney representing a former trustee appealed a $7,500 fee award because she only gained this amount of a requested $36,000 fee request following objections by two trust remainder beneficiaries. She appealed, but lost.
The problem here was that trustee and his wife conveyed trust property to themselves and took actions that made clear wife was trying to manipulate trust assets to her benefit, all in derogation of the interests of the two remainder beneficiaries. The key concern here was to determine whether there was an abuse of discretion in only awarding less than one-fourth of requested fees to trustee’s attorney, which required balancing what fees were spent to benefit the trust versus fees spent to benefit the trustee.
No abuse of discretion in this instance because a lot of the efforts went to benefitting the trustee (and wife), rather than the trust. (Donahue v. Donahue, 182 Cal.App.4th 259, 269-270 (2010) [one of our Top 20 Cases for 2010].) The lower court has authority to protect the interests of remainder beneficiaries (Salter v. Lerner, 176 Cal.App.4th 1184, 1189 (2009)), something which was apparently done in the fashioning of the fee award reducing the fee request to former trustee’s attorney in this particular case.