Multi Million Dollar Settlement

This was a complicated case that is hard to summarize briefly here. My client’s brother (the deceased) had recently moved to Colorado with his new girlfriend and was killed in a car crash in Colorado soon after. The deceased was in the process of a divorce in California from his wife, but the divorce had not yet finalized. Before moving to Colorado, the deceased had signed a Legal-Zoom will in my client’s home, having friends of the deceased act as witnesses, that attempted to give everything to my client. The deceased presumably took that will with him to Colorado. The estate of the deceased turned out to be a multi-million dollar estate. After the deceased passed, his wife flew to Colorado from California, talked the girlfriend of the deceased into letting her into the house, where she admittedly took all of the legal documents of the deceased. However, the wife claimed that there was no will in those documents and that she never saw any new will. The wife then attempted to probate an old will in which she was the sole beneficiary. We were able to obtain an un-signed copy of the signed will from e-mail records and Legal Zoom itself, and to obtain witness testimony from the witnesses to the signing that it was the same document they saw the deceased sign in their presence. After a hotly contested litigation, including many depositions conducted in both California and Colorado, extensive motions practice, and comprehensive investigations by three different investigators based in three different cities, we were able to negotiate an outstanding outcome for our client at mediation.