You're the trustee, and now you're the one being accused.

The Probate Code spells out a trustee's duties in sections 16000 through 16081. Stripped of the statutory language, they come to this:

• Follow the trust. Do what the document says, not what you think the settlor meant or what seems fair now (section 16000).
• Act for the beneficiaries, not for yourself. No deals with the trust, no using trust property for your own benefit, no borrowing from it, even briefly (sections 16002 and 16004).
• Treat beneficiaries impartially. If you are also a beneficiary, you do not get to favor yourself, and you have to be able to show that you did not (section 16003).
• Be careful with the money. The standard is a prudent person managing someone else's property: diversified investments, insured property, bills paid, taxes filed (section 16040).
• Keep people informed. Serve the notice the law requires, answer reasonable questions, and account at least once a year (sections 16060 through 16062).
• Keep trust property separate. Never mix trust money with your own. A commingled account is the single most common way an honest trustee ends up looking like a dishonest one.

None of this requires a law degree. It requires records, a separate account, and the habit of writing things down before you act, not after.

If you have just been served, or you can see a fight coming, the next two weeks matter more than the next two years.

Stop self-helping. No distributions to yourself, no selling the house to end the argument, no "small" loan from the trust account, no changing the locks on a sibling. Every one of those becomes an exhibit. If something has to happen quickly, get the court's permission or the beneficiaries' written consent first.

Preserve everything. Bank and brokerage statements, the checkbook, receipts, emails and texts with beneficiaries, the settlor's medical records if capacity is in play, and the drafting lawyer's file. Do not delete anything, do not clean up the shared drive, and do not let a bookkeeper tidy the books. A trustee who cannot produce a record is assumed to be hiding it.

Serve the notification properly. When a settlor dies and the trust becomes irrevocable, the trustee has to serve a notice on every beneficiary and every heir within 60 days (Probate Code section 16061.7). It has to contain specific language, including the warning that the recipient has 120 days to contest the trust (section 16061.8). A defective notice does not start that clock, which means the trust can be contested years later. We see this mistake constantly, and it is the cheapest one to avoid.

Get the accounting right. An accounting is a formal document with a specific set of contents: receipts, disbursements, assets and liabilities, your compensation, and the agents you hired (sections 16062 and 16063). Done correctly, it starts a three-year clock on claims about anything it discloses. Done badly, it hands the other side a list of things to object to. Have someone who prepares these for a living do it before it is served, not after the objections come in.

Yes, when you are acting in good faith, and with one catch you need to understand before you spend a dollar.

A trustee has the power to hire lawyers, accountants, and other professionals to help administer the trust (Probate Code section 16247), and the trust repays the trustee for expenses properly incurred in the administration (section 15684). Defending the trust, defending your administration of it, preparing an accounting, and responding to a petition are, in the ordinary case, expenses of administration. Trustees who never asked for the job are not expected to fund its defense out of their own savings.

The catch is the word "properly." If the court ultimately finds that you breached your duties, it can decide that the fees you spent defending that breach were not for the trust's benefit and charge them back to you personally. The line runs between defending the trust and defending yourself, and it is not always obvious in advance. That is a conversation we have at the start of every trustee engagement, not at the end.

One more point: if a removal petition was filed in bad faith and removal would go against what the settlor wanted, the court can order the person who filed it to pay the costs, including your attorney's fees (section 15642). We do not promise that outcome. We do plead it when the facts support it.

We start with the records, because that is where the court will start. The trust, every amendment, the notice you served, the account statements, and whatever accounting exists. Legion, the AI litigation platform our founder co-founded, reads all of it in days and gives us a transaction-by-transaction picture of the administration. If there is a problem, we want to be the ones who find it.

Then we fix what can be fixed. A missing accounting gets prepared. A defective notice gets re-served. A commingled account gets unwound and documented. Many trustee cases in the probate court in San Jose end when the trustee produces a clean accounting and the objections run out of things to say.

Where the beneficiary is really after your removal or your money, we defend the petition on the merits. Removal requires cause. Surcharge requires a breach and a loss caused by it, and the court can excuse a trustee who acted reasonably and in good faith (Probate Code section 16440). Undue influence and elder abuse claims require evidence, not a family's suspicion about which child was closest to the parent.

We are not here to lecture you. Most trustees who get sued did nothing worse than treat a legal job like a family one. Our work is to get you through it with the trust intact, your own money intact, and, where it can be done, the family still on speaking terms.

• Your sibling wants an accounting and you have never done one. Get one prepared now, by someone who has done them before. The petition to compel usually goes away when the accounting shows up.
• You are a co-trustee and the other one will not cooperate. Hostility between co-trustees that stalls the administration is a ground for removal, of either of you. Document your efforts to act and ask the court for instructions before the stalemate becomes the case.
• You paid yourself, and now the beneficiaries say too much. Reasonable compensation is allowed unless the trust says otherwise. Reasonable means documented: hours, tasks, and a rate a court has seen before.
• You want to resign. Sometimes that is right, but not in a hurry. Resigning does not end your liability for what happened while you served, and a rushed hand-off creates the very accounting problems you are trying to escape.
• Mom's amendment gave you the house, and your siblings say you made her do it. The question is who arranged the amendment, who was in the room, and what the medical chart said that month. Get the drafting lawyer's file and the medical records before anyone else does.