Non-Residents May Not Benefit from Alaska’s New Statute

I recently blogged about Alaska adopting a statute that allows individuals to prove Wills and trusts pre-mortem. As a result, Alaskan estate planners have gotten many calls from non-residents wanting to prevent ugly Will contests like the one surrounding Gary Coleman’s estate.

But will it actually work for non-residents? Delaware probate attorney Peter Gordon doesn’t think so, explaining that a “Utah judge sitting in a Utah court with a Utah resident is not going to send the case to Alaska.”

Unlike a trust (which is a separate legal entity residing in a particular state), a Will is simply a document used by the testator to express his/her wishes.

Thus, the Alaskan statute will be beneficial for resident testators as well as for resident and non-resident trustors. But in most cases, the non-resident testator is out of luck because the Will will still need to be probated where the testator lived.

See Scott Martin, Would the Actors Heirs Have Been Better Off with an Alaskan Will?, The Trust Advisor Blog, June 26, 2010.