You were named successor trustee. Here is what that means.

By Woodbury Law Group Last reviewed August 1, 2026

The phone call usually comes within days of the funeral. A parent's living trust names you as successor trustee, the siblings are looking at you, and the binder on the dining table is three inches thick. The good news is that the trust is doing its work: nothing here requires a courtroom, and the process stays private. The rest of the news is that California treats you as a fiduciary from the moment you accept, with duties owed to every beneficiary, not just the ones you get along with. Our role is to keep you on the statutory path so the administration ends with signed receipts instead of a lawsuit. Trusts that fail, and estates with no trust at all, take the courtroom route described on our probate overview and probate administration pages.

The first ninety days

Early tasks come in a cluster. Order more death certificates than you think you need; institutions keep them. Locate and read the trust and any amendments, because the most recent amendment controls and surprises live there. Record an affidavit of death of trustee for each piece of California real property so title reflects your authority. Obtain a taxpayer identification number for the trust, open a trust bank account, and stop using the decedent's accounts entirely. Secure the house, the mail, and the insurance. Unglamorous as this list is, every item on it becomes evidence, later, that you took the job seriously from day one.

The 16061.7 notice and the 120 day clock

Within sixty days of the death, Probate Code section 16061.7 requires the trustee to send a statutory notice to every trust beneficiary and every legal heir, telling them the trust exists, identifying the trustee, and advising them of their right to request a copy. The notice does something valuable for you: it starts a 120 day period after which recipients are generally barred from contesting the trust. Skip the notice and the contest window never closes. We prepare and serve these notices in nearly every administration, precisely because the wording and the service list have to be right for the clock to run.

Marshaling assets and date-of-death values

Next comes the inventory nobody filed in court but everyone will rely on. The trustee gathers every account, deed, policy, and business interest, confirms what is actually titled in the trust, and establishes date-of-death values, typically with a licensed appraisal for real estate. Those values set the beneficiaries' income tax basis in appreciated assets, which under current law generally adjusts to fair market value at death, so a rushed or missing appraisal can cost the family real money when property is later sold. They also become the opening balance of your accounting. Assets that were never moved into the trust may need a separate fix, sometimes a short court petition, sometimes a full probate.

Debts, expenses, and older A/B trusts

Before anyone inherits, the trustee pays what the estate owes: final bills, mortgages and property taxes on trust real estate, administration expenses, and the decedent's final income tax returns. Married couples' trusts from the 1990s and 2000s often add a structural step, a mandatory division into sub-trusts (the A/B or bypass design) that made sense under old estate tax law. Some of these divisions still must be funded as written; others can be simplified. Getting that call wrong affects taxes and the survivor's rights for decades, so it is one of the first things we analyze in any administration for a surviving spouse.

Accountings, distributions, and receipts

Probate Code section 16062 requires the trustee to account to beneficiaries, at least annually and at the end of the administration, showing every receipt, disbursement, gain, and loss. A clean accounting is your shield. When it is delivered with the proposed distribution schedule, beneficiaries can see exactly how the numbers were reached, and most administrations end quietly: assets distributed under the trust's terms, each beneficiary signing a receipt and, commonly, a release. We draft all of it, and we structure preliminary distributions when the family needs funds before the final wrap-up can happen.

When the court can actually help

Staying out of court is the default, not a rule. Probate Code section 17200 lets a trustee or beneficiary petition the probate department for instructions, and a careful trustee uses it when the trust is ambiguous, a beneficiary cannot be located, or a proposed action is likely to be attacked no matter what. One well-framed petition can convert a decision you would defend for years into an order that protects you the day it is signed. When the dispute is deeper than an instruction can solve, a contested accounting, a contest of the document itself, our probate litigation practice handles it.