Court Opinion

ID: 9722921
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-26 09:55:40.610119+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:24:42.117501
License: Public Domain

Currie, J.
(dissenting in part). I fully concur with the majority opinion that a will-contest compromise agreement, whereby one or more legatees yield up a portion of the bequeathed. estate to the heirs at law, involves a policy question rather than a constitutional one, which policy question has been resolved by the legislature.
There was not presented in Will of Rice (1912), 150 Wis. 401, 136 N. W. 956, 137 N. W. 778, the situation where legatees under the will yielded up part of their legacies to the heirs at law in compromise settlement of a will contest, but instead the agreement entered into amounted to a complete remaking of the will, particularly certain trust provisions of the will. The decision, therefore, in that case is not authority for the principle that it is unconstitutional for the legislature to authorize compromise-settlement agreements wherein the legatees agree to yield up a portion of the estate bequeathed to them to the heirs at law.
Under the compromise agreement approved in the instant case the attorney fees of the contestants, amounting to $5,000, were to be paid out of the estate. The effect of the majority *11opinion is to disallow such $5,000 as an item of administration expenses to be deducted in arriving at the net estate subject to inheritance tax. Sec. 324.13 (1), Stats., provides in part as follows:
“In a contest upon the probate of any will, . . . the court may, if the contest is necessary or meritorious, allow to the proponent of such will and to the successful contestant in such proceedings a reasonable attorney’s fee to be paid out of the estate of the decedent. . . .”
It should be borne in mind that this statute was enacted prior to the adoption of sec. 318.31, Stats. Before that a will contestant, in order to be deemed successful, necessarily had to secure court denial of the propounded will to probate. Now, with the enactment of sec. 318.31, sec. 324.13 (1) should be construed in the light of sec. 318.31. When contestant heirs secure a substantial portion of the estate, as in the instant case where by reason of the instituted contest they secured somewhat in excess of half the estate, the result should be held to be successful rather than unsuccessful. The meritoriousness of the contest is attested to by the fact that the learned trial court approved the compromise whereby the legatee Kogut yielded up slightly more than half the estate bequeathed to him.
The $5,000 attorney fees of the contestants having been approved as reasonable by the trial court, the same should be allowed as a part of the deductible expenses of administration in determining the inheritance tax.
I am authorized to state that Mr. Justice Broadfoot and Mr. Justice Steinle concur in this dissenting opinion.