Navigating Capacity and Conflict: The Estate Planner’s Role in Combating Elder Financial Abuse

Testamentary capacity and contractual capacity are critical, yet often subtle, threats to the validity of a client’s estate plan and whether their final wishes will be respected. If you work with a client who is older and where capacity to make a will or a trust may be questioned by any of their potential beneficiaries, you should consider the implications of, and how to protect against, a claim that your client lacked testamentary capacity.

Testamentary capacity is the legal term for a person’s mental ability to create or alter a valid will. It is generally considered to be a lower standard than contractual capacity, which is required for making any kind of contract, which includes a trust. Both are tested by courts at the time when the will or trust is created or updated.

For financial advisors and their firms, the responsibility extends beyond simple compliance. It requires a proactive, defensive posture within the estate planning process. When an older client’s decisions regarding their estate appear coerced or their final wishes seem to suddenly and illogically shift, the core issue quickly pivots to legal capacity and the presence of undue influence. A breakdown in capacity awareness and a failure to address influence concerns can lead directly to contested documents and subsequent, costly litigation against the client’s estate and the firm itself.

In passing, it’s important to recognize that the same vulnerabilities that expose a client to undue influence in their estate planning are also strong indicators that they may be vulnerable in managing their day-to-day financial affairs. However, the primary focus for firms must be on the legal standard of undue influence as it relates to the validity and contestability of essential estate planning documents.

The Critical Challenge of Client Capacity

It is common for an elderly client to communicate through a close family member, personal assistant, or caretaker. This dynamic, while practical for daily interaction, raises a significant concern for the advisor: ensuring the estate plan truly reflects the client’s autonomous will and not the demands of an interested party. This is required under the legal standard for ensuring there is not undue influence in the estate planning process. The presence of an overbearing or overly-involved third party is a crucial red flag that requires immediate, objective documentation by the attorney, and a financial advisor may be called upon to assist.

Case Study: The Brooke Astor Scandal

The worst-case scenario for any professional serving an elderly client is having their professional judgment—particularly regarding the client’s mental capacity—challenged under oath in a public courtroom. No situation illustrates this professional and reputational hazard more vividly than the high-profile litigation surrounding the estate of Brooke Astor.

The case centered on allegations that Mrs. Astor’s son, Anthony Marshall, and her attorney, Francis X. Morrissey Jr., exerted undue influence to change her will in 2003 and 2004, when she was suffering from Alzheimer’s disease. The resulting criminal trial and civil litigation placed many of the people closest to Mrs. Astor—including her long-time, trusted attorneys, financial advisors, and even personal staff—on the witness stand.

The core of the defense and prosecution arguments required these professionals to testify in granular detail about their interactions with Mrs. Astor, including:

• When they last saw her.
• What she said and how she acted.
• Whether, in their professional opinion, she possessed the legal capacity to understand and execute the documents in question.

This litigation demonstrated how the judgment of trusted advisors regarding client capacity and freedom from influence can become the central, devastating question after a client’s death, turning private financial planning into a public, protracted legal spectacle.

Proactive Capacity Determination

If you are a financial advisor and you suspect that your client’s mental capacity or influence from trusted intermediaries could become an issue upon death, you can proceed with helping them with estate planning, but documentation and a litigation-avoidance mindset become important. 

Your client must hire an attorney, and you should help the attorney document the client’s mental state and intentions, moving beyond simple observation to establish an auditable record.

After your client has passed away, a person seeking to challenge their updated or newly created estate planning documents will have the burden of proof, by clear and convincing evidence, that your client suffered from diminished capacity and was subjected to undue influence. The burden of proof will feel even higher if you helped your client to document their intent and capacity before the claim when the estate plan is executed. Importantly, greater weight is usually given if the evidence is close-in-time to the date when a legal document was signed.

To do this:

1. Have an Honest Conversation: The initial engagement must include an open discussion with the client, acknowledging the dynamics in the family and any risk of post-death litigation. It should be the attorney’s role to address this issue, but if you are the more trusted advisor, this topic may fall to you. 
   1. Address that awkwardness head on. Frame the contemporaneous capacity review as a protective measure in the best interests of the client’s intended beneficiaries. “Now, I know that no one wants to talk about this topic, but you have told me in the past that you are concerned about your daughter being angry that you’re changing your mind about her share. The most obvious way to attach your estate plan is to claim that you didn’t know what you were doing when you signed your will.” “The point here is not to embarrass you. It is to make sure that how you define your legacy is respected.”
   2. Mention that solutions exist to defend against a claim and make it almost impossible to attach the plan. Leave the details to the attorney. “Your wishes as a client should be respected by the court and those who remain after you. If you think this may be an issue, as I do, would you like us to think about how to achieve that?”
2. Document Capacity: The attorney should have a standard bag of tricks for creating the documentation to defend the validity of their estate planning documents. These tactics may have a wide range of costs and reliability, but are all aimed to create a record that would present significant hurdles to a litigant. 
   1. First, the attorney may  use a standardized, reputable assessment tool to determine capacity before accepting to update or create an estate plan. The most commonly used one is published by the American Psychological Association (APA). Of course, an attorney is not specifically trained to assess mental capacity, but this may be better proof than the litigant can submit that your client had capacity at the time the estate planning documents were executed.
   2. Second, your client may seek a psychological assessment from their primary physician, and their findings could be entered into their medical records.
   3. Lastly, your client may choose to be examined by a neurologist for the express purpose of establishing the minimum mental capacity and free will to be able to execute estate planning documents. A geriatric neurologist or forensic neuropsychologist specializing in assessment of testamentary and contractual capacity may be preferred. 
3. Clearly Delineate the Intermediary’s Role: Your client should write or orally dictate how the client wants the attorney and other advisors to interact with the relaying party (i.e., a child or caretaker). Importantly, the client should establish the boundaries of the intermediary’s authority. This step prevents the intermediary from inadvertently or deliberately controlling the process and helps ensure a clear line of communication directly to the client regarding sensitive decisions. 
4. Avoid Digital Estate Planning Platforms: Where your client’s mental capacity may become an issue, it is important to consider whether your client can meaningfully make their own legally effective selections in a browser-based tool. Moreover, an attorney is ideally positioned to advise your client on strategies to mitigate litigation risk based on a claim of undue influence or lack of mental capacity. Those are not issues that a digital estate planning platform should be handling because they require legal advice.

The Higher Bar: Testamentary vs. Contractual Capacity

The requisite capacity changes based on the type of document being executed. The legal standard for capacity to execute a will is lower than the standard required to execute a trust, which is at its core, a contract:

• Testamentary Capacity (Wills): Most states use a standard requiring the client to understand three core elements: the nature of the act (making a will), the general nature and extent of their property (bounty), and the natural objects of their bounty (beneficiaries). This threshold is deliberately designed to be low to uphold the personal autonomy of the testator. The test for a will focuses on basic comprehension at the time of execution.
• Contractual Capacity (Trusts): Because a trust is fundamentally a contract that involves ongoing fiduciary responsibilities and property management, the client must meet the higher standard of contractual capacity. This typically requires a greater comprehension of the document’s long-term effects, including the potential financial consequences and the ongoing obligations being created for the trustee and beneficiaries. This higher bar reflects the complexity and longer time of effect of a trust agreement.

In situations where the likelihood of litigation based on mental capacity is significant, the most stringent defense is to recommend the client undergo a neurological assessment on the day of or the day before document signing. The resulting report must be comprehensive, specifically addressing both the lower testamentary capacity standard and the higher contractual capacity standard, and in the absence of any persons other than the client and the person conducting the assessment. In particular, none of the attorney, the advisor, nor any intermediaries should be present. A positive report removes issues of fact that the litigant might otherwise bring before the court. 

Conclusion

For wealth management firms and their advisors, proactively addressing the risks of undue influence and diminished capacity is not merely a matter of compliance, but a fundamental pillar of fiduciary responsibility and reputational defense. The case of Brooke Astor serves as a stark warning that failure to establish a robust, objective, and auditable record of a client’s autonomous will can result in costly, public litigation where professional judgment is placed on trial. By adopting a litigation-avoidance mindset, collaborating with legal counsel to implement contemporaneous capacity documentation—including objective medical assessments—and clearly defining the role of intermediaries, advisors can create significant hurdles for potential challengers, ultimately ensuring the client’s final wishes and legacy are honored.