Over the past several years, the budget axe has fallen upon our Surrogate’s courts. The loss of personnel has resulted in huge backlogs in clerks’ offices. A simple application for  Letters of Administration may  literally  take months during which time it may be impossible to insure property of the estate. An application to sell the

Michael Petro’s article in the Buffalo Law Journal  is an interesting  piece about  a relatively new provision of the law which permits us to end an “irrevocable” trust. It’s easy to decant a fine wine but not always so with an irrevocable trust.

Before the law was changed in 2011, ” irrevocable” meant just that.