When an estate is contested or complicated:
We take contested probate matters, dependent administrations, and large or complex estates in El Paso County and the far West Texas counties around it.
Practice areas
Routine probate is handled well by plenty of other firms, and we send that work to them. What we take is the estate that has broken down, grown complicated, or carries enough value that one wrong step costs real money.
Family businesses, ranch and commercial real estate, assets sitting in more than one state or across the border, and estates large enough to owe federal estate tax.
Administrations run under the court’s supervision, where the representative needs an order in hand before most significant acts.
Self-dealing, refusal to account, distributions that never arrive, and conflicts the representative will not acknowledge.
Disputed marriages and parentage, heirs nobody can locate, and competing claims to the same estate.
Breach of trust, contested distributions, and demands for a trustee’s accounting.
Each of those pages explains how that kind of matter actually runs in the El Paso County probate courts. The full list is on our practice areas page.
The courts
El Paso County is one of the few counties in Texas with a bench that does nothing but probate. Texas Government Code Section 25.0731(b) gives it two statutory probate courts, Probate Court No. 1 and Probate Court No. 2. Most Texas counties have none, and probate there competes for room on a county judge’s general docket.
Your court is set when the original application is filed, and the rest of the estate stays with it under the same cause number. You do not pick the judge, and a contest brought years later lands in whichever court already holds the file.
These courts hear more than ordinary probate. Texas Estates Code Section 32.007 gives a statutory probate court jurisdiction concurrent with the district court over suits against a trustee, suits involving inter vivos and testamentary trusts, and claims against an agent under a power of attorney. So a will contest, a fiduciary duty claim, and a fight over trust property can be decided by one probate judge instead of split between two courthouses.
Statutory Probate Courts
Both courts sit in the county courthouse, but not side by side: Probate Court No. 1 is in Suite 1201 and Probate Court No. 2 is in Suite 422, so check which court has your case before you head downtown. Filings go through the Probate-Civil Division of the El Paso County Clerk, and El Paso runs on Mountain Time, an hour behind the rest of the state.
Contested matters
Expect to mediate before you see a trial setting. Texas Civil Practice and Remedies Code Section 154.021 lets a court refer a pending dispute to mediation on its own motion, and probate judges with a full docket use it.
Treat the mediation as the likeliest end of your case, and prepare for it the way you would prepare for a hearing.
Texas Estates Code Section 55.002 entitles a party in a contested probate proceeding to a jury trial as in other civil actions. Capacity and undue influence are exactly the kind of fact questions juries answer.
The right is not automatic. The demand has to be filed and the fee paid in time, or you try the case to the judge.
An uncontested probate can be finished in a few months. A contested one runs through pleadings, discovery, depositions, mediation, and a shared trial docket, and a year is a short one.
Distance stretches it further here, because the heirs, witnesses, and property in an El Paso estate are often somewhere else entirely. Be skeptical of anyone promising speed.
Don’t wait
A suit contesting a will generally has to be on file within two years of the date the will was admitted to probate. The clock runs from admission, not from the death, and the gap between those two dates is sometimes years.
Texas Estates Code Section 256.204 carries two exceptions. A suit to cancel a will for forgery or other fraud may be brought within two years of the date the forgery or fraud was discovered, and an incapacitated person has two years from the date the disability is removed. Both are narrower than they sound, and neither is a plan.
If a contest is even a possibility, mark two years from the date of admission and call us before you have made up your mind.
Service area
These counties share an appellate court. Appeals run to the Eighth Court of Appeals, which sits in El Paso and covers the seventeen counties named in Texas Government Code Section 22.201(i). An estate holding land in more than one of them is ordinary work for us, and it is one of the situations where handling the estate yourself turns expensive.
We take matters where the value of the estate or the depth of the conflict justifies real representation. If yours does not, we will tell you that on the first call, before you have paid us anything.
The first call is short and free. Bring what you have: the will if there is one, the date it was admitted to probate if it has been, and a sentence or two about who is on the other side.
Most probate problems in Texas start in the first few weeks, when families act before they know which process fits their situation. Join Texas attorney Kreig Mitchell for a plain-English walkthrough of what to do when a loved one passes:
Free to attend. Seats are limited, so register early.
