Grounds for malpractice?

[John Boellstorf]

What is the name of your state? Nebraska

My mother died testate with four living heirs. During the initial conference with The attorney he gave us a copy Nebraska Statutes regarding estates. He told and showed us that the estate could be closed easily, inexspensively, and quickly as long as we heirs could come to agreement amongst ourselves. We had no problem since mom's will was simple and straight forward and no one was contesting it.

However, after that first meeting the lawyer has been trying to pad the estate value by including items on the inventory that shouldn't be included, delaying, and meetings of no substance. He is charging on an hourly basis. The two main items he is including in the inventory that should not be included are;

1: COD's payable upon death to the heirs

2: A gift of land from our deceased sisters husband to the four living heirs.
(see my previous posts regarding details of this and time line).

In addition the attorney has made many errors on other items on the estate's inventory. These included simple math errors, duplicate inclusions of items, duplicate dollar values for different items that were clearly in error. I would have been embarassed to make a presentation to clients with so many errors. Regarding the math errors he stated 'his math skills were poor and that if he had good math skills he wold have been a doctor instead of a lawyer.

We also received a letter that 'more land was found' that had to be included in the inventory. We immediately saw that the 'new land' was due to an error legal description made by the Registered Abstractor. The attorney did not check the abstractors report and just stated that this 'property' would be added to the estate inventory. You would think 'finding more land ' would have piqued his cuiosity and raised a red flag sufficiently to check out the property.

It also appears that he had the PR sign papers and latter added attachments to the signed document.

Previous replies from postings on this forum in addition to opinions from other lawyers indicate that both of these items should be excluded from the estate inventory. If this is true and our attorney insists on including these items is this grounds for malpractice?

We could of handled this estate much better than the attorney. The only thing he had that we don't are the forms - and we discovered the forms are held 'close to the chest'! This attorney certainly is not earning his money in our opinion!!!

[seniorjudge]

Originally Posted by John Boellstorf

What is the name of your state? Nebraska

My mother died testate with four living heirs. During the initial conference with The attorney he gave us a copy Nebraska Statutes regarding estates. He told and showed us that the estate could be closed easily, inexspensively, and quickly as long as we heirs could come to agreement amongst ourselves. We had no problem since mom's will was simple and straight forward and no one was contesting it.

However, after that first meeting the lawyer has been trying to pad the estate value by including items on the inventory that shouldn't be included, delaying, and meetings of no substance. He is charging on an hourly basis. The two main items he is including in the inventory that should not be included are;

1: COD's payable upon death to the heirs

2: A gift of land from our deceased sisters husband to the four living heirs.
(see my previous posts regarding details of this and time line).

In addition the attorney has made many errors on other items on the estate's inventory. These included simple math errors, duplicate inclusions of items, duplicate dollar values for different items that were clearly in error. I would have been embarassed to make a presentation to clients with so many errors. Regarding the math errors he stated 'his math skills were poor and that if he had good math skills he wold have been a doctor instead of a lawyer.

We also received a letter that 'more land was found' that had to be included in the inventory. We immediately saw that the 'new land' was due to an error legal description made by the Registered Abstractor. The attorney did not check the abstractors report and just stated that this 'property' would be added to the estate inventory. You would think 'finding more land ' would have piqued his cuiosity and raised a red flag sufficiently to check out the property.

It also appears that he had the PR sign papers and latter added attachments to the signed document.

Previous replies from postings on this forum in addition to opinions from other lawyers indicate that both of these items should be excluded from the estate inventory. If this is true and our attorney insists on including these items is this grounds for malpractice?

We could of handled this estate much better than the attorney. The only thing he had that we don't are the forms - and we discovered the forms are held 'close to the chest'! This attorney certainly is not earning his money in our opinion!!!

John, if you feel this is malpractice, fire this lawyer and hire another one. Then sue the first lawyer for whatever dollar amount of damages you think he has caused.

You clearly do not trust this lawyer.

I can't see malpractice in your post. Probate is complicated and expensive. (Lawyers intend for it to be that way.)

You may possibly be not understanding everything your lawyer is telling you.