Healey v. Mantell

Citations

• 216 Conn. App. 514

Syllabus

The defendants, coexecutors of the decedent's will and cotrustees of all trusts created under the will, appealed from the judgment of the trial court rendered in their favor. The decedent left a will leaving the majority of his estate to a marital trust for his surviving spouse, with the residuary estate passing to a trust (residual trust) for the benefit of the plaintiffs, the decedent's two children. The residual trust was to be divided equally between two trusts, one for the benefit of each child. The terms of the separate trusts provided for mandatory distributions of trust principal when the primary beneficiary reached specific ages. The plaintiffs alleged in their complaint that the defendants had improperly failed to fund the residual trust and to pay the required distributions pursuant to the trust terms and, in so doing, had breached their fiduciary duty to the plaintiffs as beneficiaries of the estate and of the residual trust, committed legal malpractice, and engaged in negligent misrepresenta- tion. The trial court granted the defendants' motion to dismiss the com- plaint in its entirety, finding that, although the plaintiffs as beneficiaries of the residual trust had standing to sue the defendants in their capacities as both coexecutors and cotrustees, the court lacked subject matter jurisdiction over the first and third claims because administration of the estate was not yet completed and, therefore, such claims were not ripe for adjudication, and the second claim, sounding in legal malprac- tice, failed because the plaintiffs were neither clients of the named defendant or his law firm nor intended third-party beneficiaries of such defendants' legal services. On appeal, the defendants argued that they were aggrieved by the trial court's determination that the plaintiffs had standing as beneficiaries of the residual trust to bring claims against the defendants for their actions as coexecutors of the estate and that the defendants could be collaterally e