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Under D.C. Code 19-302 a surviving spouse takes the whole estate in exactly one situation, and it is not the one most married homeowners are in. How the fractional shares actually fall, why a rowhouse makes them worse, the $80,000 small estate threshold, and the reason the new affidavit shortcut is closed to any estate holding real property.

A Notice of Infraction is not a bill. It is the opening pleading in an administrative case, and paying it is an admission that follows the property. The answer deadline and the five mail days, what the District has to establish at OAH, the tenant neglect carve-out in D.C. Code 42-3502.08, the self-certification route that closes the exposure, and the 30-day receivership trigger behind it all.

Two questions decide most District drug cases: whether the government can tie the drugs to you, and whether the search that found them holds up. The possession and PWID split under D.C. Code 48-904.01, constructive possession under Rivas, the 1,000-foot drug free zone doubler and the sign the statute requires, and the separate forfeiture hearing that gets a seized car back.

The District does not run on money bail the way people expect from television. There is no bail bondsman storefront across from the courthouse, and the question at presentment is not how much. The question is whether you go home and under what conditions. Here is how release and detention actually work in D.C. Superior Court. The starting point is release When a person charged with an offense appears before the court, the statute starts from a presumption in favor of release

After presentment, a felony case in the District goes one of two ways. Either the government takes it to a grand jury, or you get a preliminary hearing. Most of the time the grand jury gets there first, and the hearing you were told about never happens. That is not somebody dropping the ball. It is how the system is built. Here is the shape of it. What a preliminary hearing is for A preliminary hearing is a probable cause check. A judge listens to enough evidence to decide wh

Somebody gets arrested in the District on a Friday night. The family starts calling around Saturday morning, and the question is always the same. When does he see a judge? The rule that answers it is one sentence long, and it does not contain a number. That surprises people, so let me walk through what actually happens between the arrest and the first court appearance, and where the real risk sits. The rule says "without unnecessary delay" Superior Court Rule of Criminal Proc

Short answer, and then the reasons. For most married couples in the District of Columbia and Maryland who own everything together, have children only with each other, and are not near the estate tax line, one joint revocable living trust is fine and it is simpler to live with. Two separate trusts start earning their keep the moment any of those three things stops being true. That happens more often than people expect. This is a question I get asked a lot, and it usually comes

A trust has no life expectancy. That sounds like a riddle, and it is the reason a perfectly good trust can quietly cost a family years of tax deferral. Federal law sets the speed at which an inherited retirement account has to be emptied by looking at the beneficiary, and it counts only human beings. A designated beneficiary has to be an individual. A trust is not one. If the tax law took your beneficiary form at face value, naming a trust would produce the worst available ou

There is a sentence in most trusts that decides whether a child's inheritance is really protected or just handed over on a delay. Most clients have never read it. Plenty have never been told it is in there. The sentence answers one question. When the trustee receives money out of your IRA, does the trustee have to pass it straight through to your beneficiary, or is the trustee allowed to hold onto it? If it has to go through, you have what the regulations call a conduit trust

Most people who come to me with an existing estate plan have a living trust that somebody set up years ago, and somewhere in the conversation it turns out the trust is also the beneficiary of the IRA. Once in a while that was a deliberate decision. More often nobody thought about it much. The trust seemed like the place where everything was supposed to go, so the retirement account went there too. I want to explain why that one line on a custodian's form deserves more attenti