Someone changed the trust, and it doesn’t add up.

Ask for the trust and every amendment in writing. Once a trust becomes irrevocable, a beneficiary or heir is entitled to a copy of the terms. Compare the versions. Note who gained and who lost in each change, and when each change was signed.

Then gather what you can about the circumstances of the change. Who drove the person to the lawyer? Who chose the lawyer? Was it the same lawyer who had always drafted for them, or someone new? Was the person in the hospital, on new medication, recently widowed, or newly dependent on the beneficiary? Text messages, emails, and calendars often answer these questions.

If the facts support it, the contest is filed as a petition under Probate Code section 17200 asking the court to declare the amendment invalid. It is often paired with an undue influence claim, a financial elder abuse claim, and a section 850 petition to recover property that has already moved. If the trustee is the person who benefited, a petition to suspend or remove them can be filed at the same time.

The trust contest deadline is 120 days from the date the trustee serves the section 16061.7 notice, or 60 days from the date the trust terms are delivered to you during that period, whichever is later. That is a short window, and the court will generally not extend it. If no notice was ever served, the window may not have started, but do not count on that: trustees sometimes serve notice at an old address, and the burden of proving what happened can fall on you.

A related financial elder abuse claim runs four years from discovery, and claims against a person who has died must generally be filed within a year of death. Those longer clocks do not save a late trust contest.

We start with the envelope. The postmark or the proof of service on the trustee's notice sets the deadline, and everything else is scheduled around it. Then we read every version of the trust side by side and build a timeline of the changes against the person's medical history and the beneficiary's involvement in their life.

The evidence in a trust contest is mostly in other people's files: the drafting lawyer's notes, the doctor's chart, the bank's records, the caregiver agency's logs. We subpoena them early. We use Legion, the AI litigation platform our founder co-founded, to go through those records in days, which lets us know what the case looks like before the other side does.

Trust contests in Santa Clara County are filed in the probate court in San Jose. Most settle at mediation once the records are in. The ones that do not are tried to a judge, not a jury, which rewards preparation over theater.

• A late amendment names one child as trustee and gives them the house. The question is who was in the room. If that child arranged the lawyer, drove to the appointment, and the parent was already declining, the amendment is vulnerable.
• A caregiver is now a beneficiary. Gifts to paid care custodians are presumed to be the product of fraud or undue influence unless an independent lawyer certified the gift or another exception applies.
• The trust was amended by a handwritten note. Amendments have to follow the method the trust itself specifies. A note that does not may be no amendment at all.
• A second spouse has changed a trust the couple set up together. Whether they could depends on whether the trust, or part of it, became irrevocable when the first spouse died. Many joint trusts split into pieces that cannot be changed after the first death.