When our law office prepares a Last Will and Testament and other estate documents for a client, we usually conduct a signing ceremony and then give the client the original and one photocopy of the Will for their records. Other attorneys have similar procedures. On occasion, however, rather than provide clients with a photocopy of.. read more →

Video of Oral Argument before the New Jersey Supreme Court in Thomas Saccone v. Board of Trustees of the Police and Firemen’s Retirement System held on February 4, 2014 in Trenton, NJ. Donald D. Vanarelli, Esq., legal counsel for Thomas Saccone, a retired Newark, NJ fireman with a severely disabled adult child who receives Medicaid.. read more →

Until recently, estate planners have typically created estate plans by using a number of sophisticated planning techniques. One common technique involved the creation of a testamentary credit shelter trust in the Last Will and Testament of the spouse who dies first. A credit shelter trust is a trust for the benefit of the spouse, or.. read more →

In a published opinion, the New Jersey Appellate Division took a further step away from requiring strict compliance with statutory formalities required for wills when it considered whether an unexecuted copy of a typed original will “sufficiently represents decedent’s final testamentary intent to be admitted into probate under N.J.S.A. 3B:3-3.” The court found that it.. read more →

Superior Court Judge Walter Koprowski, Jr. ruled on February 1, 2011 that handwritten notations on a hand-written letter constituted a valid will, although the letter itself did not. In Estate of Randall, the decedent’s cousin, plaintiff Charles Cameron, III, offered for probate two pages of a photocopied letter from 1998, with original marginal notations. The.. read more →

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D/NV) has introduced legislation designed to enact the tax cut compromise that was reached last week between President Obama and Senate Republicans. Entitled the “Tax Relief, Unemployment Insurance Reauthorization, and Job Creation Act of 2010,” the present bill is structured as an amendment to current law enacted in 2001 under.. read more →

The New Jersey Foundation for Aging was founded in 1998 to improve the quality of life of New Jersey’s older residents. The Foundation is a nongovernmental, nonprofit organization that derives its financial support through contributions from private donors, public and private foundations and corporations. The mission of the Foundation is “to improve and expand new.. read more →

Most of the cases discussed on this blog (and, I suspect, on most blogs which spotlight developments in the law) focus principally on decisions issued by the higher-level courts, the appellate courts and the supreme court of the state.  However, the majority of court decisions in New Jersey and other states are issued by trial.. read more →

In the recent case of Rossius v. Krasheninnikoff, plaintiff filed a complaint in which she alleged undue influence by the defendant upon the decedent after she discovered that defendant had obtained letters testamentary from the Ocean County Surrogate’s Court by falsely claiming that he was kin to the decedent. After a three day trial, the.. read more →