Juan Antunez, on his Florida Probate & Trust Litigation Blog, discusses how to get to a jury trial in a Florida will contest and what difference that makes. His article begins as follows:
In Florida we don’t have jury trials in will contests. But if you’re creative and the facts line up just right, your inheritance case could be decided by a jury if it’s framed as a “tortious interference with an expectancy” claim. The question then becomes, does it matter? Short answer: YES!
If you think of will contests as proxies for all forms of inheritance litigation, there’s plenty of data comparing the results of jury and non-jury trials in these cases. And that data paints a clear picture: the mechanisms we use to decide these disputes are systemically biased in favor of certain outcomes.
Posted by Lewis J. Saret, Co-General Editor, Wealth Strategies Journal.
