Citywealth Quick Insight Series on Trusts, Wills and Estate Disputes – Vicky Olivier, Baker & Partners
This week’s Citywealth Quick Insight Series on Trusts, Wills and Estate Disputes is dedicated to Vicky Olivier. Senior Associate, Baker & Partners, Jersey, Channel Islands who advises on complex cross-border litigation, trusts, and corporate disputes across Jersey and the Cayman Islands.
What leads families into litigation
In disputes involving trusts, wills or estates, what circumstances most commonly cause disagreements to move from private discussion into court proceedings?
The most common catalyst is not the existence of a substantive problem, but the failure of process. Families tend to litigate when they lose confidence that the structure provides a fair, transparent or credible mechanism for resolving disagreement internally.
In practice, disputes most often escalate following a triggering event: death, loss of capacity, divorce or remarriage, liquidity pressure, tax exposure, regulatory intervention or the proposed sale of a family business. These events place strain on structures that may have functioned smoothly for years. Litigation risk increases sharply where fiduciaries respond slowly, defensively or inconsistently, or where explanations are perceived as opaque or selective.
A further driver is the collision between informal family expectations and legal reality. Many disputes arise where assurances or understandings (“this is what was intended”) do not align with the governing documents or with a fiduciary’s duty to balance competing interests rather than advance a particular family narrative. Once trust in the process erodes, private grievance hardens into formal challenge.
Loss of confidence in fiduciaries
Across trustees, executors and personal representatives, which actions or decisions most often lead to removal applications or claims of breach of duty?
Removal applications and breach of duty claims are rarely driven by a single decision. They are more commonly rooted in an accumulated loss of confidence, where beneficiaries allege that the fiduciary can no longer be relied upon to administer the trust, estate or structure impartially and competently.
Across trustees, executors and personal representatives, the recurring triggers are unmanaged conflicts of interest, inconsistent treatment of beneficiaries, unexplained delay (particularly in distributions), poor communication, and inadequate records. Where operating businesses or illiquid assets sit beneath the structure, allegations frequently extend to failures of supervision, valuation or professional advice.
In Jersey, challenges to trustee decision-making do not invite the court to substitute its own decision. Instead, the court scrutinises whether the fiduciary acted in good faith, took into account relevant considerations, excluded irrelevant considerations, and properly identified and managed conflicts of interest. The emphasis is on the integrity of the decision-making process, not whether another decision might also have been open to the trustee.
Removal, when ordered, is directed to protecting the proper administration of the trust rather than penalising past conduct.
Requests for documents and information
When beneficiaries or heirs seek access to documents or information about a trust, will or estate, how do fiduciaries’ responses influence whether concerns escalate into formal disputes or remain manageable?
Information is the critical pressure point in trust and estate disputes. How a fiduciary responds to an information request often determines whether concerns are defused or escalate into litigation, because beneficiaries tend to interpret the response as a proxy for whether the fiduciary is acting transparently and in the interests of the trust as a whole.
Jersey law provides a clear statutory framework through Article 29 of the Trusts (Jersey) Law 1984, which regulates rights to information and documents, trustee discretion to refuse disclosure, and categories of material that are protected from disclosure, including trustee deliberations and reasons. The statutory scheme operates expressly “subject to any order of the court”.
Importantly, Article 29 does not displace the Royal Court’s inherent supervisory jurisdiction. Disclosure remains a discretionary exercise, assessed case by case, balancing the interests of beneficiaries as a whole. This approach is consistent with the principle articulated in Schmidt v Rosewood Trust Ltd [2003] UKPC 26, which rejected any proprietary right to trust documents and confirmed that disclosure is a matter for the court’s supervisory jurisdiction.
In practice, disputes escalate where fiduciaries delay, provide inconsistent responses to different beneficiaries, or refuse disclosure without explaining how that refusal advances the interests of the beneficiaries as a whole. In those circumstances, concern about information quickly hardens into suspicion about the integrity of the administration. By contrast, a structured response which distinguishes between documents that must be disclosed, documents properly withheld under Article 29, and documents that may be disclosed on controlled terms frequently keeps disagreements contained and manageable.
Administration under scrutiny
When fiduciary decisions are examined in court, which aspects of day-to-day administration most often attract criticism or legal challenge?
When fiduciary decisions are examined in court, criticism most often attaches to process rather than outcome. The areas that attract the closest scrutiny are not exceptional decisions, but routine aspects of administration that have been handled inconsistently or without adequate structure.
In practice, challenges frequently focus on valuation methodology where assumptions are undocumented, or advisers’ input is not clearly evaluated; liquidity management where distributions are delayed without a coherent rationale; and the timing of distributions where beneficiaries are treated unevenly or explanations are not recorded. The treatment of competing beneficiary interests is another recurring pressure point, particularly where trustees cannot demonstrate how they identified, weighed and balanced those interests in reaching a decision.
Courts also examine closely how conflicts of interest were identified and managed, and whether trustees actively supervised delegated functions rather than relying uncritically on third parties. While delegation is permissible, a failure to interrogate advice, monitor agents or record decision-making regularly attracts criticism. Weak or incomplete records often prove decisive, not because the outcome was necessarily wrong, but because the fiduciary is unable to demonstrate that decisions were taken rationally, in good faith and with proper regard to relevant considerations.
Governance failures as a dispute trigger
How do weaknesses in governance, such as unclear decision-making authority, poor record-keeping, unmanaged conflicts of interest or lack of succession planning, contribute to disputes in trusts, wills and estates?
Governance failures are frequently the true cause of disputes, even where litigation is framed around a specific transaction or distribution.
Common weaknesses include unclear decision-making authority, poorly defined roles between trustees, protectors and family members, unmanaged conflicts of interest and inadequate succession planning. Poor record-keeping is not a cosmetic failing; it undermines confidence in the administration and materially increases litigation risk.
In estates, governance failures tend to surface as delay, uncertainty and poor creditor management. In trusts, they often drive beneficiaries to court because internal governance mechanisms no longer command confidence.
Multiple families, divorce and changing relationships
To what extent do divorce, remarriage and children from different relationships increase the risk of disputes, and where do trusts, wills or estate plans most often fail to reflect these family realities?
In Jersey practice, divorce, remarriage and children from different relationships are consistently among the strongest predictors of trust and estate disputes. They do not merely increase emotional complexity; they expose structural weaknesses in planning that are then tested through the court’s supervisory jurisdiction.
The risk is highest where trusts or estate arrangements were established during an earlier relationship and never properly revisited. Many Jersey trusts and wills are still drafted on an implicit first-marriage assumption, where the interests of a surviving spouse and children are expected to align. Once that assumption falls away, particularly following remarriage, the structure itself often becomes the source of conflict.
The points of failure are familiar. One recurring issue is outdated letters of wishes or dispositive provisions that no longer reflect the family’s composition, but which trustees are nonetheless asked to treat as influential. Another is the concentration of control in a surviving spouse who is also a stepparent, particularly through appointment powers, protector roles or informal influence, while the ultimate economic interest is intended to pass to children of an earlier relationship. That configuration creates an inherent conflict which is frequently ventilated through allegations of partiality, improper purpose or failure to balance interests.
A further pressure point arises on incapacity or death, where succession to key fiduciary or control roles has not been clearly addressed. In Jersey litigation, disputes are often framed as challenges to the rationality or good faith of trustee decision-making, but the underlying driver is frequently uncertainty as to who should now hold influence within the structure and for whose benefit decisions are really being taken.
These disputes tend to crystallise at predictable moments: following the death of the settlor or testator, upon the remarriage of a surviving spouse, or when adult children from different relationships begin to assert competing expectations of benefit. At that stage, dissatisfaction with outcomes is commonly reframed as breach of duty, conflict of interest, or failure to give proper weight to relevant considerations, providing a legally orthodox route to challenge what is, in substance, a planning misalignment.
From a Jersey perspective, blended families do not create new legal principles. They expose the limits of structures that rely on harmony rather than clear allocation of benefit, control and succession, and those limits are increasingly explored through contested trust and estate proceedings.
Religious and cross-cultural legal expectations
How do differences between religious or cultural inheritance expectations and common law trust or estate structures give rise to disputes, and where do these tensions most often surface?
Disputes framed around religion or culture are rarely about belief systems themselves. They are about expectations of entitlement and fairness.
Where discretionary trust structures depart from cultural or religious inheritance norms, disappointment can quickly harden into challenge. Tensions most often surface at moments of transition, such as death or incapacity, when informal expectations collide with legally binding arrangements. These disputes are amplified in cross-border families, where different legal systems attach very different weight to moral, cultural or religious claims.
Family businesses, economic pressure and external change
How does the involvement of a family-owned business or operating asset change the nature of disputes in trusts, wills or estates, particularly when economic shocks, regulatory change or tax reform place pressure on control, liquidity and succession?
Family businesses materially change the nature of trust and estate disputes because they introduce questions of control and timing that cannot be postponed. External change often forces fiduciaries to act before consensus exists, and it is that compression of decision-making that drives litigation risk.
A clear example is the impact of changes to the UK non-dom regime. Reforms affecting the availability of the remittance basis and the introduction of deemed domicile concepts have, in practice, forced families with UK-connected structures to confront long-deferred questions about ownership, residence, funding and succession. In family-owned businesses held through trusts or underlying companies, those changes have required urgent decisions about dividend policy, capital distributions, refinancing or even sale, often to meet personal tax exposure at shareholder or beneficiary level.
In that context, disputes frequently arise between those actively involved in the business, who prioritise retaining capital and operational stability, and passive beneficiaries or family members facing immediate tax liabilities, who press for distributions or restructuring. Trustees and fiduciaries are then placed under acute pressure to balance competing interests in real time, sometimes against a background of incomplete information and rapidly evolving advice.
What follows is predictable. Decisions taken to preserve the business are challenged as favouring one class of beneficiary. Decisions taken to generate liquidity are criticised as shortsighted or destructive of long-term value. The legal framing is orthodox, allegations of failure to balance interests, improper purpose or failure to take relevant considerations into account, but the underlying driver is an external regulatory change that has forced decisions sooner, and in a more polarised environment, than the structure was designed to accommodate.
Older trusts and outdated structures
Do long-standing trusts or estate arrangements that have not been reviewed or updated tend to generate disputes as families, assets and laws change, and where are the main pressure points?
Older trusts and estate structures generate disputes not because they are old, but because they are asked to respond to events they were never designed to address.
A common example in practice is a discretionary trust settled decades ago with a narrow class of beneficiaries and a governance model centred on a single individual or family adviser. Over time, the family grows, relationships change, assets diversify and regulatory expectations increase, but the trust mechanics remain static. Letters of wishes are not updated, appointment powers sit with individuals who are no longer close to the family, and administrative provisions assume a level of informality that is no longer realistic.
Disputes tend to crystallise when an external event forces the structure to operate under pressure. That may be the death or incapacity of a dominant family figure, a change in tax treatment affecting distributions, or the need to realise or refinance an illiquid asset. At that point, beneficiaries begin to scrutinise why certain individuals retain control, why historic wishes are still being followed, or why trustees are relying on assumptions that no longer reflect the family’s circumstances.
What is then challenged in court is rarely the age of the trust itself. It is the trustee’s continued reliance on outdated guidance, governance arrangements or decision-making frameworks without properly reassessing whether they remain appropriate. The legal framing is orthodox—failure to take relevant considerations into account, improper reliance on historic wishes, or failure to balance interests—but the root cause is structural inertia.
Sanctions, insolvency and creditor pressure
How do sanctions, regulatory action, debt or insolvency affect trust and estate administration, and in what ways do they increase the risk of disputes?
Sanctions, insolvency and creditor pressure increase dispute risk because they impose hard external constraints on fiduciary action, often unevenly across a beneficiary class, and force decisions that cannot be deferred.
A typical sanctions scenario arises where one beneficiary becomes designated, or where a trust holds assets through jurisdictions or banking relationships affected by sanctions regimes. Trustees may be legally prohibited from making distributions, dealing with assets, or even communicating freely without licences. Other beneficiaries, unaffected by sanctions, experience delay or restriction and begin to question whether the trustee is over-cautious, misapplying the regime, or using sanctions as a justification for inaction.
Similarly, in insolvency or creditor-driven contexts, disputes often arise where trust or estate assets are exposed to claims against a settlor, a beneficiary or an underlying company. Trustees are required to prioritise asset preservation, engage with officeholders or creditors, and reassess historic distributions or transactions. Beneficiaries facing personal financial pressure may press for distributions precisely when trustees are constrained from making them.
In both cases, escalation rarely turns on whether the fiduciary’s legal position is correct in the abstract. It turns on how those constraints are managed and explained. Delay, refusal or conservatism, although legally justified, are frequently reframed as lack of transparency, failure to exercise discretion, or undue preference of one interest over another. Litigation then becomes the mechanism through which beneficiaries seek to test whether external constraints genuinely justify the fiduciary’s approach.
Bonus questions
Based on your experience, what three actions would you most strongly advise trustees or beneficiaries to start doing, stop doing, or do differently to reduce the risk of trust, will or estate disputes escalating into litigation?
One of the clearest lessons from recent trust and estate litigation is that disputes rarely arise because the law is uncertain. They arise because structures are asked to perform functions they were never designed to accommodate, without timely clarification or recalibration.
The first and most important step trustees and advisers should take is to address structural ambiguity proactively, rather than allowing uncertainty to harden into dispute. A number of recent cases demonstrate how apparently technical drafting issues can evolve into full litigation when they intersect with real family expectations. A clear example is the Jersey decision in In the Matter of the Estate of the Late Constantin Mattas [2024] JRC 068, where the Royal Court was required to intervene to determine the validity and construction of a mixed charitable and non-charitable trust created under a will. The court ultimately preserved part of the structure by severing invalid elements, but the dispute itself arose because the settlor’s overall intention and the mechanics of benefit distribution were not sufficiently clear. The case is a reminder that uncertainty in governance or dispositive design, if left unaddressed, creates fertile ground for disagreement once an estate or trust comes under pressure.
Closely linked to this is the need to move away from assumption-based governance. Trustees and fiduciaries often rely, sometimes unconsciously, on informal understandings, historic letters of wishes or long-standing family dynamics as a substitute for clear, current decision-making frameworks. Recent offshore litigation shows that courts are increasingly unwilling to treat such assumptions as an adequate foundation for fiduciary action. This was illustrated in the Cayman Islands decision in AA v JTC (FSD 12 of 2024 (IKJ)), a STAR trust case in which the Grand Court considered an application by an enforcer for the court’s blessing of what were described as momentous decisions. The case underscored the expectation that fiduciaries and enforcers must be able to articulate, with precision, the basis on which decisions are taken and how those decisions are said to advance the purposes of the trust. Reliance on informal understandings or untested assumptions is no longer sufficient when decisions come under judicial scrutiny.
Finally, trustees need to change how they record and explain their decisions. Many disputes escalate not because a decision was obviously wrong, but because the reasoning behind it was reconstructed after the event rather than documented contemporaneously. Courts across offshore jurisdictions have repeatedly emphasised that fiduciaries must be able to demonstrate that they identified relevant considerations, managed conflicts and exercised discretion in good faith at the time decisions were taken. In practice, weak or incomplete records allow beneficiaries to recast dissatisfaction with outcomes as allegations of breach of duty. By contrast, clear contemporaneous decision-making records often prevent concerns from escalating, even where decisions are unpopular.
Taken together, these three themes point in the same direction. The most effective way to reduce litigation risk is not defensive lawyering after relationships have broken down, but deliberate, disciplined governance before pressure points are reached.
What headlines disputes do you remember and why?
One dispute that has stayed with me and continues to inform how I think about trust litigation, is the Tchenguiz litigation. I encountered it not as an abstract case study, but as part of my own formative experience in offshore practice, including its Guernsey and Jersey dimensions. Although much of the litigation unfolded in England, the dispute drew offshore trust structures directly into the spotlight and exposed how quickly trust administration can become adversarial when external pressure is applied.
The litigation followed the Serious Fraud Office investigation into Vincent Tchenguiz, which was later found to have been unlawfully pursued (R (Tchenguiz) v Director of the Serious Fraud Office [2014] EWCA Civ 1409). That finding triggered extensive civil and satellite litigation involving regulators, advisers and counterparties, with trustees required to navigate competing demands for disclosure, confidentiality and cooperation, often under acute time pressure.
From an offshore perspective, what made Tchenguiz significant was not a single trust law ruling, but the way in which trustees and fiduciaries were forced to make difficult judgment calls in real time, against a backdrop of regulatory intervention and rapidly deteriorating personal and commercial circumstances. Issues that offshore practitioners recognise immediately (disclosure to third parties, cooperation with investigators, and the extent to which trustees should resist or comply with external demands) became central, and confidence in the administration quickly became as important as technical compliance.
The case remains a reference point because it illustrates a recurring theme in modern trust disputes: litigation is often triggered not by internal family disagreement, but by an external shock that exposes weaknesses in governance, decision-making and documentation. Once that happens, trust law mechanisms, including disclosure applications and supervisory relief, are frequently deployed as tools to regain control or information. Tchenguiz is remembered because it shows how quickly that shift can occur, and how difficult it is to reverse once confidence has been lost.
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