Two Legends, Two Estate Planning Failures: Lessons from Prince and Aretha Franklin

by Michael Hackard

Publication Date October 20, 2026 in Estate Planning

A woman I’ll call Teresa called our office not long after her mother died. I have changed the details, but I hear some version of this call often. Her mother had been a careful person. She paid her bills on time, kept an immaculate house, and raised three children largely on her own after a divorce. But she never got around to a proper estate plan. She had once written something on a yellow legal pad and tucked it into a kitchen drawer. When the family found it, two of the three children agreed it looked like a will. The third disagreed. That disagreement turned into a court fight that took far longer and cost far more than any of them expected.

I have sat across from families like Teresa’s for more than forty years. The details change, but the underlying story is often the same. People put off planning. They assume something informal is close enough. They believe the law will sort things out fairly when the time comes. The law sorts things out mechanically, according to rules written without any knowledge of their family, their relationships, or their intentions.

Prince Rogers Nelson and Aretha Franklin are the most famous recent versions of a story I have watched unfold in California courtrooms and conference rooms for decades. Their estates are worth studying because ordinary families make the same mistakes on a smaller scale.

Two Legends, Two Planning Failures, One Warning for California Families

Prince Died Without a Will, and Californians Do the Same Every Day

Prince died on April 21, 2016, at Paisley Park, his home and recording studio in Minnesota. He was 57. He left no will, no spouse, and no children. Nothing expressed where his wealth should go or who should carry his legacy forward.

What followed was years of court proceedings under Minnesota’s intestacy statutes. Prince’s estate became a fight over who qualified as an heir and what his music was worth. The court ultimately recognized his one full sister and five half-siblings as heirs. The bank administering the estate appraised it at about $82.3 million; the IRS valued it at $163.2 million. The two sides did not settle on a figure of about $156.4 million until early 2022. “It has been a long six years,” one of the siblings’ lawyers told the court. Along the way, lawyers and consultants were paid tens of millions of dollars to administer the estate.

A state’s intestacy formula does not know your family. It cannot account for the sibling who provided care during a final illness, the estranged relative who contributed nothing, or the long-term partner who was never legally married. In California, that formula begins at Probate Code section 6400, and it applies to the part of any estate a valid will does not dispose of, whether the estate is worth $300 million or $300,000.

Aretha Franklin’s Handwritten Wills, Found at Home and Fought Over for Five Years

Aretha Franklin died on August 16, 2018. She was 76. She left no formal, typed will, but she did leave assets valued in the millions, including real estate in Michigan.

Months after her death, in 2019, her niece found handwritten documents at her home. One, from 2010, was locked in a cabinet. Another, from 2014, was under her cushions in a spiral notebook on her couch, and hers had a smiley face next to her signature. Three of her four sons were on opposite sides of the conflict. Edward and Kecalf Franklin argued that the document from 2014 governed; Ted White II argued for the 2010 version. In July 2023, nearly five years after her death, a Michigan jury declared the 2014 couch-cushion paper a legitimate will. In November 2023, the probate judge awarded her sons real estate under the will.

Five years, for a notebook found under a couch cushion.

What Happens When a Californian Dies Without a Will

The State Decides Who Inherits

California does not guess at the intent of a California resident who dies without a will. It has a fixed order. The surviving spouse or registered domestic partner takes a share, depending on whether the property is community or separate, and which other relatives survive. Then children, then parents, then brothers and sisters, then more distant relatives.

That formula does not mirror the reality of many families in California. Imagine a man who married twice, has children from the first marriage, stepchildren he raised for twenty years from the second, and a partner he never married after his second wife died. California intestacy statutes distribute his estate according to legal relationship only. He raises stepchildren who get nothing unless he adopted them, and the exceptions are narrow. The partner gets nothing unless they registered as domestic partners. Children from the first marriage take shares fixed by statute, not by the quality of those relationships.

Blended family inheritance disputes are among the most painful cases I handle, precisely because the conflict was preventable. A properly drafted and funded trust would have said what the decedent wanted. Intestacy says nothing; it applies the formula.

The Hidden Cost of Probate: Fees Are Calculated on Gross Value

California’s statutory probate fees are calculated on the gross value of the estate, not on net equity. That distinction matters enormously to California homeowners.

Suppose you own a home in Sacramento worth $900,000 with $600,000 still owed on the mortgage. Your equity is $300,000, but the fees are figured on $900,000. Probate Code section 10800 sets the personal representative’s fee, and Probate Code section 10810 sets the attorney’s fee on the same sliding scale, calculated without reference to the mortgage. On a $900,000 estate, that comes to $21,000 each, $42,000 in total, before any extraordinary fees, court costs, or litigation expenses.

In the Bay Area, where a modest home can cross $1.2 million, the numbers climb. On a $1.2 million estate, the statutory fees are $25,000 each, $50,000 in total, even if the family’s equity is only $500,000. And the family waits, often more than a year, for the probate court to finish.

A revocable living trust, properly funded, keeps the assets titled in it out of probate. It is not a complicated document, and for many California homeowners it is the most effective way to make sure their families inherit what they built, rather than what remains after fees and delay.

Blended Families, Half-Siblings, and Intestacy

Prince’s family was not simple. He had no surviving spouse and no children, one full sister, and several half-siblings. Minnesota’s statutes decided how his estate was divided among relatives whose connections to him ranged from close to nearly nonexistent.

California families face the same exposure. Under Probate Code section 6406, half-siblings in California generally inherit the same share as full siblings. The top probate and estate battles California heirs face consistently involve blended families, half-siblings, and long-term partners who were never legally recognized. When there is no plan, the law fills the vacuum, and the law does not know your family.

California Recognizes Handwritten Wills, but That Is Not the Whole Story

What Makes a Holographic Will Valid Under Probate Code Section 6111

California does recognize handwritten wills. Under Probate Code section 6111, a will is valid as a holographic will, whether or not anyone witnessed it, if the signature and the material provisions are in the testator’s own handwriting. No witnesses are required, and no notary. A date is not strictly required either, but an undated holographic will can fail if the missing date leaves doubt about whether it or an inconsistent will controls.

Many California families take the wrong lesson from this. They believe the estate planning myths about holographic wills: that a handwritten note is “basically a will,” that it will hold up in court, that it is close enough. A document can be legally valid and still be unclear enough to start a lawsuit, and the Franklin case proves it.

Valid Is Not the Same as Clear

The Michigan jury did uphold Franklin’s 2014 will. Reports from the trial described pages full of scribbles and hard-to-read passages. One son argued that his mother normally handled legal matters conventionally, with lawyers, which cast doubt on whether the notebook pages were meant to be a will at all. The family spent nearly five years and significant resources getting to a verdict.

In a California will contest, the questions are similar. Did the person have the mental capacity to make a will when the document was written? Did they intend that particular document to operate as a will, or was it a draft, a note, or a wish list? Was anyone pressuring them? And when there are several documents, which one controls?

Even a lawyer-prepared will or trust that is properly signed and witnessed doesn’t eliminate every dispute, but it makes those questions a lot easier to answer. The execution is recorded. The witnesses can attest to the signing. The intent is obvious from the face of the document. The Franklin family found out how far away a will that eventually survives a challenge is from a will that never invites a challenge in the first place.

When Multiple Wills Exist, Courts Must Decide Which Controls

The Franklin estate turned on two competing documents. California courts facing that problem ask when each document was made, whether a later one revoked an earlier one, and whether they can be read together.

Under Probate Code section 6120, a will can be revoked by a later will that revokes it expressly or by inconsistency, or by being burned, torn, canceled, obliterated, or destroyed with the intent to revoke it. An informal document that never says whether it replaces an earlier one invites exactly the kind of fight the Franklin sons had.

Sibling trust disputes in California frequently involve this competing-document problem. I have seen cases where a parent left a formal trust, then a handwritten amendment, then a letter that might or might not have been meant to change the trust. Each document becomes a weapon in the hands of the heir it favors, and the litigation consumes estate assets and family relationships at the same time.

If You Find a Handwritten Will, the Law Gives You a Deadline

The most practical rule for a family holding a found document is Probate Code section 8200. Unless a petition to probate the will has already been filed, whoever has custody of a will must, within 30 days after learning of the death, deliver the original to the clerk of the superior court in the county where the estate may be administered, and deliver a copy to the person named as executor or, if that person cannot be found, to a named beneficiary. A custodian who fails to do this is liable for the damages that failure causes. Hiding an inconvenient document, or deciding on your own that it “doesn’t count,” is not an option the law allows.

The Special Needs Question in the Franklin Estate

Most coverage of the Franklin estate focused on the competing wills and the couch cushions. Less attention went to her eldest son, Clarence. Reports described him as having special needs. He did not take part in the trial; both handwritten documents said he must be supported financially by the estate, and his representatives reached a settlement giving him a percentage of the estate regardless of how the will contest came out. I do not know his circumstances beyond what was reported, and I will not guess at them. But the question his situation raises comes up in California families all the time.

How an Outright Inheritance Can Affect SSI and Medi-Cal

When a person who relies on Supplemental Security Income receives an inheritance outright, the consequences can be immediate. SSI counts a beneficiary’s resources against a limit of $2,000 for an individual. An inheritance that pushes a beneficiary over that limit can stop benefits that may pay for housing and daily support. Medi-Cal applies its own, different eligibility rules, and they need to be checked separately.

Supplemental Needs Trusts

The usual planning answer is a third-party supplemental needs trust: a trust created by a parent or other relative, with the relative’s own money, that supplements rather than replaces public benefits. “You can do it in a living trust, or you can do it in a will. In theory, you could set one up with a handwritten will, but writing distribution rules and trustee powers that preserve a beneficiary’s eligibility is exactly the kind of thing that goes wrong on a legal pad. The trustee needs to know what the trust can and cannot pay for, without jeopardizing eligibility.

This is not only a celebrity problem. I see it in ordinary California families. A parent dies without a proper plan, a child with a disability inherits outright, and the family calls us after benefits are already at risk. The grief and inheritance disputes that follow are among the hardest cases to handle, because the family is mourning two losses at once.

The Real Cost of No Plan

The financial cost of dying without a plan can be calculated: statutory probate fees on a $1.2 million home, extraordinary fees when administration becomes contested, attorney fees for beneficiaries who need to protect their interests, and value lost during a long administration.

The human cost is harder to measure. When inheritance claims go wrong, the damage extends far beyond dollars. Siblings who were close before a parent died find themselves on opposite sides of a lawsuit. An adult child who spent years caring for a parent watches a distant relative take an equal share under the intestacy formula. A long-term partner is left with nothing because the relationship was never formalized. These are the kinds of cases I handle, and in my experience, many of them could have been prevented.

What California Families Should Do Now

In general, the difference between a will that survives a challenge and one that never gets challenged is the difference between informal and formal planning. A well-drafted and properly funded revocable living trust keeps the plan private, avoids probate for the property in it, and clearly states your intentions. It is flexible to change as circumstances change and can include provisions for a beneficiary with special needs, for blended familial dynamics, and for the relationships that matter to your family.

California and Michigan: Why the Franklin Case Still Matters Here

The Franklin litigation was in Michigan, and the rules of the two states are not the same. Michigan also demands the holographic will be dated. California does not, however, a holographic will that is undated may fail in the circumstances described in section 6111. But both states recognize handwritten wills, and the risks are the same: multiple informal documents, unclear signatures, and dueling arguments over what the writer meant. These issues arise in California courtrooms each year.

If planning has already failed in your family, there is still a path forward. That includes a parent who died without a proper plan, a handwritten document that has surfaced and divided the family, or a beneficiary with special needs whose benefits may be at risk. Estate litigation is for families who are already in conflict and need experienced representation to protect what they are entitled to receive.

We represent California beneficiaries in estate and trust litigation, including on contingency for qualified cases. We offer free case evaluations, and no attorney’s fees are owed unless we recover compensation; clients may be responsible for case-related costs and expenses. If your family is facing a disputed estate, a contested will, or a trust administration that has gone wrong, call Hackard Law at (916) 313-3030.