A Los Angeles probate run in the right order.

By Woodbury Law Group Last reviewed August 1, 2026

Probate administration is the court-supervised version of settling an estate. It applies when a Los Angeles resident dies owning assets in their sole name, with no trust and no beneficiary designation to carry them, and the total is too large for the small estate shortcuts. From that point forward, a judge at the Stanley Mosk Courthouse oversees who is in charge, what the estate contains, who gets paid, and who inherits. This page walks the sequence the way it actually unfolds, because families who know the order ahead of time make better decisions at every stage. Everything described here is work we do for personal representatives; if you want the wider view first, start with our probate overview.

The petition that opens the case

A Petition for Probate, Judicial Council form DE-111, opens the estate in the county where the decedent lived. If there is a will, the original gets lodged with the court. The petition asks the judge to admit the will (or find there is none), appoint a personal representative, and set the scope of that person's authority. Filing triggers two kinds of notice: mailed notice to every heir and every person named in the will, and publication in a newspaper of general circulation in the city where the decedent lived. Publication is not a formality anyone can skip. A case published in the wrong paper gets flagged and continued.

The court may also require a bond, essentially an insurance policy protecting the estate against mismanagement, unless the will waives it or all beneficiaries do. Bond premiums come from estate funds, and we routinely structure waivers to avoid the expense where the family situation allows it.

Appointment: Letters and the Duties form

When the petition is granted, the court issues Letters, the one-page document that proves the representative's authority to every bank and title company in California. Letters Testamentary issue under a will; Letters of Administration issue without one. Alongside the Letters, the representative signs the Duties and Liabilities of Personal Representative form, an acknowledgment of the fiduciary rules that now apply: keep estate assets separate, never borrow from the estate, keep records of every transaction, and stay accountable to the court. We go through that form line by line with each client, because it is the standard the judge will later measure the administration against.

Inventory, appraisal, and the probate referee

Within four months of appointment, the representative files an Inventory and Appraisal on form DE-160 listing everything the estate owns. Cash items are valued by the representative. Everything else, the house, the brokerage account, the business interest, goes to the probate referee, a state-appointed appraiser assigned to the case at filing. The referee sets date-of-death values and charges a statutory commission based on the appraised total. Those values matter later: they set the baseline for the accounting, they feed the statutory fee calculation, and they document the tax basis of inherited property.

The creditor claim period

Issuing Letters starts a claim window, generally four months, during which creditors must file formal claims against the estate. Known creditors receive direct notice. The representative then allows or rejects each claim, and a rejected creditor has a short window to sue or lose the debt. Handled properly, this period is what lets an estate close with finality. Handled carelessly, with distributions made while claims are still open, it is the single most common source of personal liability for representatives, and cleaning up that mistake costs far more than avoiding it.

Independent administration and selling property

Most modern petitions request authority under the Independent Administration of Estates Act, Probate Code section 10400 and following. With full IAEA authority, a representative can take most actions, including selling the house, by serving a Notice of Proposed Action on interested persons and waiting out the objection period, no hearing required. With limited authority or none, real property sales must be confirmed in open court, where the sale is subject to statutory overbid procedures and a stranger can walk in and raise the price. We push for full authority in nearly every case, and when a court confirmation sale is unavoidable we prepare the family for how the overbid process actually plays out.

The accounting and final distribution

The estate closes on paper. The representative files a final account showing every receipt and disbursement from the date of death forward (beneficiaries can waive the formal account), together with a petition for final distribution that tells the court who gets what and why. Once the judge signs the order, the representative distributes, collects signed receipts, and is discharged. That order is the point of the whole exercise: clean title, closed claims, and no one able to reopen the question later.

What it costs and how long it takes

Ordinary attorney and representative fees are fixed by Probate Code section 10810 as percentages of the gross estate: four percent of the first $100,000, three percent of the next $100,000, two percent of the next $800,000, and one percent of the next $9 million. Both fees are paid from the estate at the end, with court approval. A routine Los Angeles administration runs nine to eighteen months, and the difference between the two ends of that range is mostly execution: petitions filed correctly, probate notes cleared before hearings, and the e-filing rules followed to the letter. When a will or the administration itself is disputed, our probate litigation practice steps in, and when the decedent left a funded trust instead of a probate estate, the work moves to trust administration.