Inherited property in Missouri

December 29, 2020 9:18 AM

A relative who lives in California has inherited property (acreage not a home) in a rural Missouri county from another relative who lived in a different state. There is a will. Apparently the heir needs to file the will in Missouri and go through probate in order to become the new owner and sell the property. How does this person find a reliable attorney knowing absolutely nothing more than that?
posted by Bella Donna to Law & Government (4 answers total)

Is the heir also the executor? Because if not, this is usually the executor's job. My best advice as someone who has done something similar to this is either find the lawyer who wrote up the will if it's decently recent (i.e. if the lawyer is likely to still be alive), second option, someone else from the same legal firm if possible, third option would just be to find a Wills & Trusts attorney in the same county who can conduct business over email/fax/phone (some are good at this, some are not). Alternately you could get ahold of a realtor in the area in which the property is located and see if they could locate or suggest an attorney who does wills/trusts but maybe also could do real estate stuff and then you've got one lawyer (potentially, depending how small town this is) who can do both things.
posted by jessamyn at 9:25 AM on December 29, 2020 [2 favorites]

I had to do something similar a couple of years ago. I called the courthouse of where the property was located to get the name(s) of attorneys who could handle the ancillary probate.
posted by jtexman1 at 9:37 AM on December 29, 2020 [1 favorite]

We had a relative who died intestate so my wife and her brother got the house by default. Wife had to handle everything and the people at the courthouse were incredibly helpful in giving us a sense of what sort of events and paperwork are involved. Also as jtexman says, they may have a list of attorneys.
posted by freecellwizard at 2:40 PM on December 29, 2020 [2 favorites]

The Missouri Bar has a "find a lawyer" page that allows you to search by county and type of practice, with "Estate Planning and Trusts" as one of the options. If you can't find any other recommendation, I would try pulling some names out the hat on this site, then just cross-check against the ethics complaints database to screen out any obvious problems. What you describe sounds pretty simple, so I would ask potential lawyers for an overall budget for what you need and then, if you are OK with it, authorize them to go ahead with that budget, but get back to you if for some reason it is taking more effort. If it is a very rural county, there won't be that many names to choose from. Also, though, if there is a nearby larger town in a different county, you might want to try that county, too, as a lawyer in a rural area is going to practice in several counties and, generally, the more sophisticated lawyers are going to be in the bigger towns. I.e., don't go with some random solo practitioner just because they are in the same county as the property.
posted by Mid at 10:25 AM on December 30, 2020 [1 favorite]