Your mother died. Her trust was drafted twenty years ago by an attorney whose office is a three-hour drive from where you live, and the firm may or may not still exist. You are the successor trustee, there is a rental property involved, and the first thing you assume is that you are stuck with whoever holds the file.
You are not.
Do you have to go back to the attorney who wrote it?
No. Jason Gaudy, an estate planning attorney at Gaudy Law in Upland, California, answers this one directly about his own clients: if you did a trust with his office, or if your parents did, you do not have to come back to them for the trust administration or the probate.
“You can have any attorney do that,” he says. He adds, reasonably, that his firm would love for those families to come to them. But the trust does not bind the family to the firm that drafted it.
Trust administration is the after-death work the successor trustee has to get done: gathering the assets, notifying beneficiaries, handling creditors and taxes, retitling or selling real property, and distributing what is left. In California that work usually happens outside of court, which is the entire point of having the trust. Any attorney competent in the field can run it.
How often does this actually come up?
Very often, in Gaudy’s practice, and usually for the mundane reason of geography.
The pattern he describes: mom died, she worked with an attorney in central California or San Diego, but the family lives in the Inland Valley and wants somebody closer to home. His firm takes on trusts drafted by other lawyers all the time, and he assumes other firms do the same with trusts his office wrote. The trust is the client’s document, not the drafting attorney’s.
The line that matters is the state, not the city
Distance within a state is a logistics question. State lines are a licensing question, and that one is real.
Gaudy is licensed in California and practices only in California. He works across Los Angeles, San Bernardino, Riverside, Orange, and San Diego counties, mostly Southern California, but he is clear that his practice stops at the state border.
That distinction matters most for real property. A California trust can own an Arizona house or a rental in Ohio and can administer those properties when the owner dies. When his firm handles deed work in another state, they find local counsel there to do it. What the trust prevents is ancillary probate, a second separate probate proceeding in the state where the out-of-state property sits. Holding real estate in multiple states covers that structure in more detail.
The practical rule: an attorney anywhere in your parent’s state can generally handle the administration, and the property’s location drives what else is needed.
What if the drafting attorney has retired or died?
This is where “you are not locked in” stops being reassurance and starts being necessary.
Gaudy has a team of attorneys and a contingency plan for his own firm if something happens to him. Plenty of solo practitioners do not. He notes that many of the older attorneys who drafted trusts a couple of decades ago have since retired or passed away, and their files were paper, not digital, so there is often no copy to retrieve.
That is a document problem more than a lawyer problem. A new attorney can administer someone else’s trust; nobody can administer a trust that cannot be found. If your parents are still living, making sure the trust and the deed are findable is the higher-value conversation to have now.
What the first meeting usually looks like
When a family comes in after a death and the trust was done correctly, Gaudy says his office meets with them, answers their questions, and then does not see them again, because they do not need court intervention.
He gives similar advice to a surviving spouse: call an estate planning attorney and ask what needs to be done. Often the answer is close to nothing. Many trusts are designed to simply stay in place after the first death, and the concrete task is recording an affidavit of death against the real property, unless the property sits in an LLC, where that step is not required. What happens to the trust when the first spouse passes covers that in full.
An initial consultation with a local attorney is a cheap way to find out how much work is actually in front of you. It commits you to nobody.
What this means if you’re planning a 1031 exchange
Successor trustees who inherit rental property end up making an investment decision they did not ask for: keep it, sell it, or reinvest the proceeds. If the family wants out of the landlord role, an exchange is one route, and how a DST compares to other 1031 options is usually the question behind it. The timing pressure is real, since the exchange clock starts at the sale, not at the death. The attorney handling the administration needs to be someone who can move on that schedule and who is reachable. Again, that person does not have to be whoever drafted the trust two decades ago. If you are working through that decision, reach out before the property is listed.
Watch: Parent's Attorney in Another City? You Can Still Get Help with Jason Gaudy, Gaudy Law
Educational only. Not legal, tax, or investment advice. Jason Gaudy is licensed in California; rules vary by state. Consult your own advisors.