Contested Wills in Pascagoula, Mississippi

Find the right Contested Wills attorney in Pascagoula, MS

It is possible, in Pascagoula, Mississippi, to go to court and claim that a will is invalid, in some cases. This is called a Will Contest.

Sometimes, when a person who expected to be included in a will is left out, their natural assumption is that there was some mistake, or that the will was made through improper means, such as duress or fraud, or that the will is an outright forgery.

If a lot of money, or some particularly valuable property, is at stake, the person who was left out might want to go to court and allege that the will was invalid. When left out of a will, a family member might naturally assume that some kind of mistake has been made, whether this is directly true or not.

You should remember that a will contest frequently results in adversarial legal proceedings, which can be very contentious. Considering the likelihood that other members of your family might be on the other side, it's clear that this can really damage a person's relationship with his or her family.

When Can a Will be Contested in Pascagoula, Mississippi?

There are various reasons that a court in Pascagoula, Mississippi might invalidate a will.

For example, a will obtained through duress (a threat of harm, typically physical) is invalid. Of course, duress is very difficult to prove after the fact, and the issue may not even come up until many years after it allegedly occurred, making proof even more difficult. However, if the named beneficiary was in some type of position of power or trust with respect to the decedent, and is not someone who one would normally expect to get a large gift in a will (they're unrelated to the testator, for example), those facts alone might be enough to raise the suspicion of impropriety. Of course, those facts by themselves are not enough to prove duress.

A will can also be rejected because the decedent was not mentally competent to draft it at the it was made. A court will look at the person's mental capacity at the time the will was made, so even if the testator is now perfectly sane, if he or she was incapacitated for whatever reason (by way of intoxication, for example) at the time the will was made, the will can still be invalidated.

There are many other facts that might make a will invalid, and thus serve as grounds to contest a will. If a will is successfully contested in Pascagoula, Mississippi, and held to be invalid, this typically results in the property being distributed as if the decedent had died intestate (without a will). This means that it will usually go to the decedent's closest living relative.

Can a Pascagoula, Mississippi Contested Will Attorney Help?

Contesting a will is never particularly easy or enjoyable. However, a knowledgeable Pascagoula, Mississippi attorney can help take some of the burden off of you, and handle some of the most difficult aspects of this process.

Talk to a Wills, Trusts & Estates Law Attorney now!

Life in Pascagoula

Pascagoula, Mississippi is a city in Jackson County. As of a 2007 estimate by the United States Census Bureau, it has a population of about 24,000 people.

Native American tribes have inhabited Pascagoula for thousands of years, and the name comes from a word that means "bread-eaters" which is how one of the groups of native inhabitants referred to themselves. A Spanish explorer is believed to have made first contact with them in 1540. However, the first permanent European settlement did not come until the 1700s. This area did not become part of the United States until 1812. Before then, it changed handsmultipletimesbetween the French, Spanish, and English. Pascagoula became a city, under the state's legal definition, in 1901. The current downtown area of Pascagoula was once part of Scranton, Mississippi, until the two towns merged in 1912.

Pascagoula, Mississippi is strategically situated on the Gulf of Mexico. Accordingly, its beaches are a popular tourist destination, and its fisheries are an important part of its economy.

If you live in Pascagoula, Mississippi, and have any sort of legal problem, you can probably find someone to help you with it. Pascagoula, Mississippi lawyers can handle just about any case that they might be faced with.

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