Hello -my father passed away after starting a personal injury case against a nursing home. At the time of his passing he had no

September 30, 2015

Question

Hello -my father passed away after starting a personal injury case against a nursing home. At the time of his passing he had no will and no debt nor did he owe anything. They had mentioned that they were changing it to a wrongful death case (I am not sure if that ever happended). In any case the nursing home settled and after going down to the lawyers and signing docs which they said would go to Supreme Court then to Surrogates Court they issued a check made out to my mom w/ the estate of "dad's name". This was 5 months ago - my mom has been unable to deposit this check into her account as it has estate of on there and we were never told to set up an estate. I had been given the run around several times by the lawyers office who handled the case - one time in which one of the partner

Answer

Assuming the settlement occurred after the death of your father, the firm should have issued a check to your Mom AFTER they obtained a Surrogates Court decree approving the distribution of the settlement monies in the estate. I'm going to assume this was a paralegal error from the accounting department, and they didn't just take their fee and lump your Mom with the task of sorting out the Surrogate's Court administration - which they are not permitted to do. Put your complaint in writing to them. If they don't correct the error, you may need to hire a lawyer who knows what they're doing to return this nonnegotiable instrument (ie the check w/"estate of") to them and straighten this out..

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