A caveat is a pleading which any interested person (creditor, heir, or other party who meets the definition under Fla. Stat. Ch. 731.201(23)) may file with the Probate Clerk in the county in which the deceased resided. The purpose of a caveat is to put the world on notice of your particular interest in the estate, and to make anyone trying to open the estate serve you with notice first before anything happens.
For example, in the case of Smokey Susan, we filed a caveat in order to keep Melanie from opening Joe's estate without our knowledge. When Melanie did file her petition seeking to be personal representative, the rules required her to serve Susan with formal notice. The service of formal notice gave Susan 20 days to respond. Thus, we answered the petition and filed our own pleadings, thereby framing the dispute up for the court and preventing Melanie from seizing control of Joe's estate. Without the caveat, we would have been entitled to notice (to Susan as the natural guardian of Tami), but given Melanie's prior misrepresentations to the funeral home regarding Joe's lack of living relatives, there is a good chance we would not have received notice. We would have been left with the unenviable task of checking the clerk's website daily to see if Melanie had opened the estate, and we would have had to go through an entire additional set of pleadings just to get our interest before the court.
A caveat is a great way to make sure that you know when a probate is filed. Many times, a parent will die and a dispute will arise between siblings. Generally, one of the siblings will have control of the parent's will, and has had access to the parent's finances up until the death, but refuses to share the information with the other children. There is a method to force the person in control of the will to file it with the clerk of court (look for that information in my next post), but if there's no reason to do so and you just want to make sure a probate does not happen without your knowledge, a caveat is your best bet. Not only does it serve your purposes well, the filing fee is relatively inexpensive and the cost of preparing a caveat should be minimal.
Julie
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