Estate of Scott

I am always interested when a Texas court of appeals upholds an undue influence verdict. Undue influence is not easy to prove. But in Estate of Scott, a jury found that three separate wills were the product of undue influence. And the court of appeals upheld those findings.

The decedent was a single man with no children. His closest living relatives were two cousins. The facts are complex and the entire opinion is here. In short, the decedent suffered from various mental and physical impairments. He had fought against a court imposed management trust. Dissatisfied with a bank’s control of his money, he hired a private investigator and an assistant to help him have the trust lifted.

Eventually, the decedent executed three wills that were introduced at trial. One holographic, one prepared by the investigator based on a form , and another prepared by an attorney. In connection with the latter two wills, the investigator videotaped the testator affirming that the wills reflected his true wishes and stating he did not want to leave anything to his cousins. While the wills left assets to a charitable trust, the evidence at trial was that the wills left the bulk of of the decedent’s assets to the investigator and his assistant.

The Tarrant County jury knocked out all of the wills, finding they were the product of undue influence. The jury also found that the investigator and assistant did not offer the wills in good faith and with probable cause. That denied them the recovery of over $400,000 in attorney’s fees from the estate.

In upholding the jury verdict, the El Paso Court of Appeals cited the following evidence:

First, the undisputed evidence demonstrated that when Buford first met Tait and Rueda, he did not have a will, and had not expressed any intent to draft a will; to the contrary, in his 2010 meeting with Dr. Clayton, Buford told her that his family did not write wills and that they had all died intestate. Tait himself admitted that when he initially suggested to Buford that he should draft a will, Buford was resistant to the idea, and that he spent several months trying to convince Buford of the need to do so.

Tait’s efforts were documented in two emails that he sent to attorney Pam Walker in October of 2014, in which he stated that he had been “working on” Buford for two years to get Buford to “trust” him enough to follow his advice, and that it took “several months” before he “finally got [Buford] to write out a holographic will.”6 In addition, Tait submitted an invoice to Buford billing him for his assistance in preparing the Holographic Will, expressly stating that Tait spent four and a half hours at Buford’s home on March 23, 2013, “to help him prepare will.” . . .

Moreover, attorney Pam Walker, who represented Buford shortly after he signed the Holographic Will, testified that she believed Buford had “paranoid” tendencies, and found him to be “susceptible” to being influenced by someone he trusted. She further believed--after learning that Buford had left the bulk of his estate to Appellants in his August Will--that Appellants had taken advantage of Buford’s paranoid tendencies, and had fueled his suspicions about the cousins’ role in the earlier guardianship proceedings to serve their own purposes. In particular, Walker recalled that on at least two occasions Tait “bad-mouthed” Buford’s cousins in front of Buford. . . .

Moreover, Dr. Clayton testified that Buford’s susceptibility increased due to his physical ailments and the medication that he was taking during his final illness in the hospital. By the time of his hospital stay, Buford had tumors in both his liver and lungs. He was in liver and kidney failure, had low oxygen levels, and had toxins in his blood. A treating physician noted that Buford did not appear to understand his diagnosis, was anxious and in pain, and exhibited “scattered thinking” during his hospital stay. Dr. Clayton further pointed out that while in the hospital, Buford was being treated with narcotic pain medicines that would have affected his cognitive abilities. Dr. Clayton concluded that Buford’s physical condition and his medications would have likely increased his preexisting paranoid tendencies, making it even easier to manipulate or take advantage of him.

Ultimately, I suspect the jury was suspicious that the bulk of the decedent’s assets were going to two non-relatives who entered the decedent’s life relatively late. And this also played a substantial role in the court of appeals finding there was sufficient evidence to support the undue influence findings.