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What Happens When An Attorney Dies Without A Current Succession Plan?

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Location: Iowa

An attorney I used to work with recently passed away. He had in his possession a large number of important legal documents belonging to both myself and several clients of my business. It is my understanding that in Iowa, attorneys update their succession plans annually with the bar. However, the attorney was not practicing the last year of his life, and his family is claiming that his succession plan was not updated.

In cases such as this, would the Bar automatically step in to take on the successor role? On the business front, I am being asked to help coordinate the retrieval of documents from a large storage unit used by the attorney in question. The reason I am being asked to coordinate this is essentially because we know what we are looking for on a professional level and also happen to have records of individual documents which may be held in storage with this attorney.

The attorney's son and trustee is trying to tell us (through an intermediary) to just come and pull everything out of the storage unit and he will write up a release to transfer possession to my company. The obvious issue is that not everything in storage belongs to myself or my clients and I do not believe the attorney's son has the authority (even lacking a current succession plan) to transfer possession of these documents.

submitted by /u/AceSeptre
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