Summary
Part 1
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Extract
The new Florida Trust Code.
An important event occurred this past legislative session. Ch. 736 was added to the Florida Statutes. For estate, family law, elder law, and tax practitioners; for clients, their beneficiaries, accountants, and trustees; for regulated trust companies and for Florida courts, this promises to be a big deal!
A long time in the making, new Ch. 736 and some conforming amendments made to the Probate Code and other Florida statutes are the product of a five-year effort by the Ad Hoc Trust Code Revision Committee (1) to codify Florida trust law. When it takes effect, the new Florida Trust Code (FTC or the Code) will replace Florida's existing statutory trust law, most of which is found in Ch. 737. As will soon be apparent, the new Code contains numerous changes and additions. As a consequence, it has a delayed effective date of July 1, 2007. Between now and then, practitioners and other interested persons have a window of time in which to familiarize themselves with the new Code. This two-part article is intended to facilitate that process. Part 2 will be published in the October issue of The Florida Bar Journal. Introduction Florida's interest in a trust code coincides with a similar interest around the country in general. This interest has been fueled primarily by the promulgation of the Uniform Trust Code in 2000. Presently, the Uniform Trust Code (UTC) has been enacted in 15 jurisdictions; (2) it is under active consideration in several more. Early on, the committee concluded that uniformity in the law of trusts was a desirable goal. Except where the committee came to a different policy conclusion or where the committee wished to avoid approaches that have proven to be controversial elsewhere, in areas of trust law for which there was no existing judicial or statutory law in Florida, the committee's operating principle was to adhere as much as possible to the language of the Uniform Trust Code. The committee took a somewhat different view of areas already covered in F.S. Ch. 737. Although the committee did not hesitate to simplify, restructure, and, on occasion, revise provisions it believed could be improved, the basic operating principle with many of the existing Florida statutes was the old saw--if it ain't broke, don't fix it! The end result is that the Florida Trust Code is comprised about 40 percent of provisions found in prior Florida law and about 60 percent of provisions based on the Uniform Trust Code. Of the provisions in this latter group, almost a third were revised in some substantive respect. The Code consists of the 13 parts of new Ch. 736. In the interest of uniformity, these parts correspond in title and content to the 11 articles that make up the Uniform Code, plus two additional parts covering rules of construction and charitable trusts, respectively. Part IX, titled Trust Investmen...See the full content of this document
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