Last Will & Testament as a Suggestion
Portia B. Scott, J.D., L.L.M. • May 12, 2022

Your Final Word???

Many folks presume that a Last Will and Testament is an absolute declaration which must be followed. This is not the case.

 

Though given enormous weight by a Probate Court, a Will is often actually treated as an assortment of suggestions by the person whose signed the Will. For instance, if you, in your Will appoint your friend, Betty, to be your Personal Representative (sometimes called Executrix or Administratrix) but Betty lives in another state or is a convicted felon. She will not be eligible to be appointed by the Court as the Personal Representative (the “PR”) and a back-up choice will be needed.

 

Similarly, your PR has very limited authority until your Will is presented to a Judge in a Probate proceeding and the Judge finds that the Will is acceptable (“admitted into probate”) and so is the nominated PR (not a felon and either a close relative or resident of Florida).  Only then will the Court issue the document which gives authority to the PR, her “Letters of Administration.”

 

Once the PR is appointed and empowered, she starts gathering together your assets and making arrangements for finding out to whom you may owe money, for payment of your last expenses and reporting all of that to the probate Court, with proof. Only after all potential creditors of your estate are identified and their claims evaluated and paid (or contested), may your PR start making distribution of the remaining assets according to directions you put in your Will.

 

What if there are not enough assets in your estate to pay all your debts? (Consider that you died in an automobile accident which was your fault and the other driver was hurt very badly. The other driver gets a judgment against your estate and ends up with most of your assets.) 

 

If there are insufficient funds to make all of the gifts you have in your Will, the specific gifts get paid first. So, the $5,000.00 gift to your church (which you thought would be only a small percentage your estate when you signed the Will) gets paid before the other, less specific gifts. It could be, that you thought you were leaving $500,000.00 to your son and only $5,000.00 to the church. But if your estate is only $6,000.00 when all the debts are paid, then the church gets its $5,000.00 and your son, who was to inherit “everything else” only gets $1,000.00.

 

Better to leave a specific gift as a percentage with a cap, such as “1% of the value of my estate up to $5,000.00.” 

 

If your estate does not have enough money to pay all of your debts, even your specific gifts, such as shares of stock, bonds or your art collection, will not be given to the people you wanted to receive them. Those types of assets will be used to pay the debts of the estate.

 

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And furthermore....

By Portia B. Scott, J.D.,L.L.M. • April 2, 2026
Another Warning from our Appellate Court Regarding Al I hate to repeat myself, but.... The March 25, 2026 release of written opinions from our own Fourth District Court of Appeal (4th DCA) has another warning to persons venturing into the Court system. As you may know, I wrote about a warning from the 4th DCA about a self- represented Appellant (person seeking to have the trial court's decision overturned) using Al and the possible, but not inflicted, sanctions which could have resulted. Now, again, in Gouveia v. Meridian Financial Investments, LLC, the 4th DCA has again written to address this increasingly abusive use of Al in the Courts. In this more recent case, there was a contract dispute and the trial court ruled in favor of the Plaintiff (the party making the complaint...get it? "Plaint-iff" based on "Com-Plaint?"). The losing side filed an appeal, asking for the 4th DCA to overturn the decision of the trial court. Well, that went nowhere and the Plaintiff kept its win. The story here is that the person who lost at trial and on appeal, in his case and appeal to the 4th DCA apparently used Al to help write his argument. The Al manufactured ("hallucinated") prior cases which did not exist or, if they did exist, did not stand for what the person said it did. It would be as if the person made reference to Roe v. Wade (a case which does exist) and told the appeals court that it stood for the legal principal that a Jack of Spades has a higher value in poker than the King of Spades (which is absolutely not what Roe v. Wade said). Is that straight-up nonsense? Yes and as absurd as that which was submitted to the appeals court as if it were true. The Court issued another warning about the possibilities of sanctions if it is done again by the person submitting it, just like before. But, as the concurring opinion in this case points out something else (a "concurring opinion" is a written opinion which agrees with the actual opinion but has more to say). The concurring opinion points out how meaningless it is to threaten sanctions against someone who will most likely not be before the Court again. That means that the opportunity to misbehave for this person is greatly reduced. Most self-represented folks only appear once -if at all- before the appellate court. The concurring opinion said that with attorneys, it is not a problem as sanctions will work against us, seeing how we are in court so often. What is the solution? The writer of the concurring opinion doesn't know but suggests some pro-active steps. (Sanctions are, by their very nature, reactive - they are issued in response to something done.) Perhaps forcing sworn statements from the parties that they have not used Al or, if they have, exactly what the Al included; that the party submitting the Al- generated document has double-checked the sources. Something which can help us all work with the rising tide of Al, Chatbots, LLM tools.  Stay tuned!

Appellate Court Issues Warning to Non-Attorneys Filing Appeals

By Portia B. Scott, J.D.,L.L.M. • March 26, 2026
The Florida trial courts' decisions are subject to appeal to a higher Court. This happens when a litigant (the Plaintiff or Defendant) believes the trial court made a mistake and that the mistake should be corrected. The mistake believed to have been made by the trial court can be based in the facts of the case ("that is not what the evidence showed"), the law ("that is not what the statute or other source of law says"), or both. A recent opinion from the 4th District Court of Appeal (which takes such claimed mistakes from the circuit trial courts in Broward, Palm Beach, Martin, St. Lucie, Indian River and Okeechobee Counties) dealt with an alleged mistake of law. The person who was claiming the mistake (the Appellant), was representing herself. Without an attorney to help her write the appeal, she resorted to Artificial Intelligence ("AI"), as we can expect many people do or might start doing. The decision came back from the 4th District Court of Appeal, disagreeing with her; the appeals court found no error by the trial court. But for the use of Al, there probably would not have been any thing actually written. The 4th would have just said something like, "we find no error." However, the Al tool had "hallucinated" what other, prior District Courts' had said. In the paperwork submitted by the Appellant, she had cited certain old cases saying that these cases were opposite of what the trial court had ruled. She claimed that the trial court had used the wrong law and that she should have won. The problem, as you might have guessed, is that the cases did not exist - some of them not at all. Other cases she cited to the 4th were actual cases, but did not say what her Al asserted they said. Here is the reason everyone needs to know this: Self-represented litigants are held to the same standards as an attorney. Obviously, attorneys are not allowed to make up old cases and present them to a Court (trial or otherwise). If we do use Al to help find the old cases, we absolutely have to check to make sure that they are real and do exist. If we do not, we can be sanctioned - maybe even having to pay the other side's attorney's fees which, for an appeal, can easily be in the tens of thousands of dollars! That is a scary prospect. The self-represented litigant could have faced sanctions - just like her attorney would have had she had one. In this particular case (Roussell v. Bank of New York Mellon, Etc., decided March 11, 2026), the appellate court did NOT sanction her, but easily could have. This was probably a decision issued as a warning to all.