From The Advisor’s Fuel Podcast with Adam Koós, CFP®, CMT®, CEPA — a conversation with Professor Kelly Lise Murray, lawyer, mediator, legal scholar, and host of the Wealth Litigated podcast.
You spend a whole career helping clients build wealth. Then a missed checkbox, an unchanged beneficiary form, or a trust the surviving spouse can quietly drain wipes out the plan you thought was airtight.
That is the uncomfortable space Kelly Lise Murray works in. She taught law at Vanderbilt for nearly two decades before turning full-time to what she calls “all the drama of true crime without the blood”: real courtroom fights over trusts, estates, and family wealth. The through-line in every case is the same. Money litigates, and it litigates hardest when documents do not coordinate. Here are the cases, the mechanics, and the questions you should be asking clients before any of this lands in a courtroom.
Because the documents stop matching what the client actually intends, and nobody catches the gap until someone dies or files for divorce.
Murray’s core message is that wealth planning is not one document. It is a stack of what she calls lifecycle legal documents: prenuptial and postnuptial agreements, wills, trusts, beneficiary designations, healthcare directives, and more. Each one gets created at a different life event, often by a different person, often years apart. When they conflict, a statute usually wins, and it is rarely the outcome the client had in mind. As she puts it, the lack of coordination is what leads to litigation.
That is also where advisors add value. You are not writing the documents. You are the person in the room often enough to notice when a client’s life has changed and their paperwork has not.
The single biggest mistake is not updating estate documents before and after a second marriage.
More than half of marriages involve people who have been married before, and many bring children into the mix. Two specific traps come up again and again:
There is a healthcare version of the same problem that advisors should keep top of mind. Adam shares a recurring cautionary story: a man divorced, remarried, then ended up non-responsive in a hospital with his ex-wife still named on the healthcare directive. Unless the client makes the change, the first person the hospital calls may be the person they least want making medical decisions.
The lesson is that outcomes swing hard on state law and on how specifically the client documented their intent. Murray walked through several.
In an Ohio case, a father changed his will one month before remarrying and never updated it again. He died of COVID complications in 2021, leaving three young children and roughly $10 million in total wealth (about $5 million in the probate estate). His widow claimed the children had been accidentally left out as “pretermitted heirs,” which would have had them inherit as if there were no will and disinherit the man’s siblings. The siblings fought back, arguing the children had in fact been provided for through millions in lifetime and post-death transfers. The trial court sided with the widow and children; the appellate court reversed and sent it back for more investigation. The takeaway: if you intend to disinherit a blood relative, you have to say so specifically, or intestate-succession statutes decide for you.
A California case went the opposite direction. A father married three times, with one biological child from each of his first two marriages and a stepson from the third. The biological children opposed the stepson’s claim to inherit as a “natural child.” Because the father had referred to the stepson as his son to close friends throughout his life, even after that third divorce, the court found the stepson met the state’s definition of a natural child and could inherit. Same broad situation, completely different result, driven entirely by state-specific law.
From 30,000 feet, Murray’s planning lesson across all of it is one word: clarity. And being clear in your head is not enough. Your documents have to match that clarity, or you need them legally revised.
Sometimes yes, if the trust has no real accountability built in. This is where structure does the heavy lifting.
In a Franklin County, Ohio case (Collins v. Flannery), a husband and his second wife had a trust that became irrevocable when he died, with the wife as sole trustee and answerable to no one. Complicating everything, the couple had been going through a divorce when he died, so assets transferred under the trust rather than under the divorce. His two adult daughters sued to force an accounting. The stepmother argued they had no standing because they were only contingent remainder beneficiaries. The court held the daughters did have standing and could force an accounting, but they lost their bid to remove the stepmother as trustee. One judge wrote separately to say the trust’s supposed guardrails were illusory, meaning she could potentially deplete the entire trust and leave the daughters with nothing.
A Texas case was more blatant. A trust set up to support a disabled brother was drained by his sister, the trustee, on personal expenses: a divorce attorney, donations to a YouTube preacher, a car. Because the trust named a successor trustee, that person could step in on the brother’s behalf. The sister tried to argue lack of standing and lack of jurisdiction, then defaulted when the evidence proved overwhelming. She was removed. The right result, but only after litigation.
Murray’s point is not to assume the worst of a second spouse. It is to remove the obligation to trust anyone blindly by building a structure of accountability. The problem cuts both ways: sometimes the disgruntled party is a stepchild stirring the pot, not the surviving spouse. As she puts it, it is equal-opportunity shenanigans.
Murray points to a few concrete guardrails advisors can raise with clients and their attorneys:
The way to introduce this to a nervous client is as structural support, not a condemnation of anyone’s budgeting or character. It is protection against litigation that would deplete the estate, and it protects the surviving spouse from suspicion just as much as it protects the kids.
The scariest ones are not strategy errors. They are simple execution failures, like a box left unchecked.
Murray points to the federal tax case Estate of Griffin v. Commissioner. A QTIP trust (funds reserved to produce income for a surviving spouse during her life without touching the principal) requires the estate tax return to be filed on time with the correct election box checked. In this case the box was not checked, and $2.3 million meant to fund the spouse’s income was listed as “all other property” instead. Because the election was not made on time, it could never be fixed. Higher exemptions make this less common today than it once was, but the principle stands.
Murray’s fix is unglamorous and effective: at least two sets of eyes before that return is filed, ideally with a checklist from the estate planning attorney confirming each step. One useful sidebar she flagged: there is a three-year statute of limitations for the IRS to challenge a QTIP election. Once that clock runs out, even a flawed-but-authorized election is safe.
Yes, especially after a move to a new state, and prenups have to be executed cleanly to hold up.
Murray described an Ohio case where a prenuptial agreement was thrown out entirely. The husband, a lawyer who should have known better, drafted it himself and had his soon-to-be spouse sign it the day before the wedding with no chance to get independent counsel. The power imbalance and the overreaching were enough; the court never even had to reach the question of whether the terms were unconscionable. Appellate courts resolve a case on the narrowest issue they can, so half an argument was all she needed.
The advisor-relevant nuance here comes from a real Adam example: his firm valued a business owner’s company right before her second marriage so the prenup rested on a current valuation, not a three-year-old number. A stale valuation is exactly what gets litigated. Think of a well-executed prenup as a deterrent and a cleaner path if divorce ever happens.
Two more things that surprised even seasoned pros in this conversation: Ohio only began allowing prenups in 2023, and a recent New York case is being cited as changing how courts evaluate them. State law moves, which is the whole argument for periodic review.
And then there is portability. If a client sets up an estate plan or prenup in one state and later moves and divorces or dies in another, it may not work the way they expect, or at all. California’s community property rules work differently from Indiana’s; a plan built for Ohio can be inapplicable in Florida. A move is a trigger to have every lifecycle document reviewed for conflicts and for how it functions in the new state.
One more mechanic worth its own flag, because Adam hit it in real life while helping his own parents set up a trust.
If you transfer a home with a mortgage or HELOC into the wrong type of trust, the lender can accelerate the note and demand the full balance immediately. A federal statute, the Garn–St. Germain Act, protects certain transfers (title moving between spouses, from a parent to a child, or on death) from triggering that acceleration clause, and it means someone inheriting a home this way generally does not have to refinance as long as they can make the payments. But only the right trust structure is protected, and a verbal “we won’t call the loan” from the bank is worthless if it is not done correctly. Get the order right before you transfer title.
The insurance angle is the one people almost never think about. Property and casualty insurance does not insure the house; it insures your insurable interest in the house. Transfer title to a trust without updating the policy, and the trust is not the named insured. If the house burns down, the insurer can deny the claim and win in court. Do the trust transfer and the insurance update together.
Murray’s advice for advisors is concrete and stays in your lane.
For clients, the single best first step is to make the estate planning attorney the hub. That attorney can coordinate with the wealth advisor, financial planner, and accountant, and tell the client what else they need or need to change.
For advisors, the highest-value move in a review meeting is to help clients inventory their lifecycle legal documents. Ask what they have, identify the gaps, and send them to the right attorney to fill those gaps. If a client says “my spouse will just control everything when I die,” Murray suggests coming armed with an actual litigated case so no one has to be the villain, then framing co-trustees, professional fiduciaries, or a trust protector as structural support that prevents estate-depleting litigation.
And her closing warning is one advisors can repeat to clients directly: do not estate-plan in a box, and do not ask AI what to do with your estate. You need non-hallucinated knowledge of the actual cases in your state, and that is what a licensed estate planning attorney provides.
Helping clients avoid these disputes is exactly the kind of high-trust, high-value work that separates an advisor clients keep for life from one they outgrow. If you want to build that depth into a practice that also scales:
For the flip side of protecting client wealth, see our conversation on risk management advisors can actually execute with Vincent Randazzo.