For Businesses
Lapses in fiduciary duty can affect closely held businesses, partnerships, and corporations, and can involve issues related to:
- Business transactions and relationships
- Shareholders
- Employment, employee benefits, and pension plans
- Investments, securities, insurance, and other financial instruments
- Undue influence
- Self-dealing
- Breach of fiduciary duty
Because the elements can be so varied, our fiduciary litigation group includes business, tax, and financial litigation attorneys who help clients restore responsibility to organizations affected by incompetence or abuse of power.
Together, these lawyers’ backgrounds encompass every aspect of fiduciary duty, providing business clients with comprehensive knowledge and resources of state and federal laws, as well as substantial experience at both trial-court and appellate-court levels.
Our services include advising individual and corporate fiduciaries, as well as banks and trust companies, on ways to avoid both liability and litigation in connection with fiduciary duty—for instance, preventive strategies for plan sponsors, administrators, and investment managers on ERISA compliance issues; guidance on fiduciary obligations and responsibilities for officers and directors of corporations; and review of investment advisory and account agreements.
When litigation is in our clients' best interests, however, our seasoned team aggressively enforces clients’ rights in court.
For Families
Does one of these scenarios describe your family’s situation?
Let us guess: the nice approach hasn’t worked
If you’re reading this page, it’s probably because your best efforts at resolving a family situation involving money haven’t been successful. You were hoping it wouldn’t come to this, but it’s time to contact a lawyer.
Because a fiduciary can be a trustee, guardian, conservator, personal representative, executor, stock broker, person given power of attorney, or financial planner or other financial advisor—and because each type of fiduciary must abide by rules that have subtle but important differences—it’s important to hire an experienced attorney who can offer clarity about the duties and responsibilities of your family’s fiduciary.
You’ve come to the right place
Respect, knowledge, and experience are the keys to bringing an inequitable situation back into balance. The attorneys in our fiduciary litigation group combine solid qualifications with a regard for dignity to bring justice to your family’s state of affairs, whether by prosecuting a claim of misconduct on your behalf or defending you from such a claim.
Experience that gives you peace of mind
Not many estate attorneys have the trial skills neces-sary to favorably resolve fiduciary-duty cases in court, and the number of trial attorneys with the required knowledge of estate and probate law is equally small. Only a handful of attorneys in Minnesota have a background that combines extensive litigation and solid knowledge of estate and probate law. Our firm’s fiduciary litigation group features lawyers who have:
Collaborated with the Minnesota Legislature on drafting portions of trust, probate, and guardianship law
- Written and updated the Guardianship and Conservatorship Handbook and the guardianship and conservatorship chapter in the state’s Elder Law Handbook (both published by Minnesota Continuing Legal Education)
- Developed the court-approved forms that every Minnesota attorney is asked to use when practicing guardianship and conservatorship law
- Chaired or served on the state legislative committee for Minnesota State Bar Association’s Probate and Trust Law section
- Gained an average of 14 years of trial and appellate experience in state and federal courts
The bottom line? Assurance that with Lindquist & Vennum’s representation, your family and your case will benefit from unusually deep knowledge of and insights into fiduciary matters—which in turn will promote swift and favorable resolution.