Not of Sound Mind or Body
Ooh, I’ve got one. I was handling a case years ago involving a challenge to a deceased’s will. My client was one of the two adult daughters of the deceased old lady.
The will made shortly before death, when the deceased was known to my client to be very frail and confused, left 2/3s or 3/4s of the estate to the other daughter, who had become closer to the deceased and taken over much of her care.
A previous will divided the estate equally. There was no reason why my client would have been treated any differently if there wasn’t skullduggery afoot.
We challenged the current will on the basis, among other things, of lack of capacity on the deceased’s part to make a valid will. If we won the older will would have been granted probate.
The other side defended it naturally. We carried the burden of proving lack of capacity, which is always difficult in those cases. We obtained discovery of the deceased’s medical records from the state hospital.
It turned out that the deceased was so severely demented by the time she made the current will that she was recorded as having answered the door to a care worker stark naked (among other more damning clinical assessments).
The case settled on the basis of what we were claiming fairly quickly after that. Story credit: Reddit / [deleted]