It's important to have guardrails around your legacy

Dolly Parton had to do smart planning to make sure her wishes for her businesses and charitable giving were honored after her death.

Dolly Parton meant a lot of things to a lot of people over the years, but now she's fast becoming a case study for the need for careful estate planning that can withstand family conflict, especially as a solo ager.

Parton didn't have children, and her husband died in 2025, but she had 11 siblings and multitudes of nieces and nephews. She also had vast, ongoing business operations, charitable ventures and a cultural legacy. Without the right protections, a dispute could tie up millions of dollars. But Parton planned out a strategy for her businesses and philanthropic work to continue through trusts, the details of which are not public.

"It's so wonderful that she put thought into it," said Jennifer B. Goode, senior national director of the wealth-strategies group at Bernstein Private Wealth Management. Nationally, only about 30% of American adults have wills and only 11% have trusts, according to Trust & Will, an online estate-planning service. "She's a role model for taking your legacy seriously."

Despite the planning, Parton's estate settlement has not been completely without drama. The trouble that has cropped up is a dispute between the managers of Parton's ongoing business ventures, She's Alive, and Parton's nephew, Bryan Seaver. Last week, a judge granted a restraining order against Seaver, with news reports saying he made threatening demands.

Seaver did not respond to a MarketWatch request for comment, nor did Parton's business manager Danny Nozell. Seaver provided a statement to ABC News denying the allegations, saying "I've never threatened anyone."

Complications, in general, are what estate planning is meant to handle.

"Estate planners take the 'what ifs' all the way down," said Amanda Rieman Sarago, an estate-planning attorney with the Hargrove Firm.

Planning for a legacy can be especially difficult with large estates or those involving a lot of illiquid assets, like properties or ongoing businesses. Even when there are direct heirs involved, they might not be up to the arduous administrative task of being a trustee or executor after the death of the principal.

About half of Stephanie Rapp's clients at Day Pitney, a large national law firm, choose to have their affairs managed by a professional, even if they have children. This involves either hiring a professional trustee or a corporate trust firm to act as trustee - which is a purely administrative role and does not involve inheriting anything.

"The trustee is a fiduciary, and they have control over distribution of assets, but their duty runs to the beneficiary. The beneficiary has economic interest in the trust, but does not have control over the assets. So you really have to distinguish between those roles," said Rapp.

The most important step Rapp asks clients to take is to make sure that the trustees understand their roles and the parameters of the trust, and that the beneficiaries also know the terms. Surprises cause problems, like if the beneficiary doesn't think their inheritance matches with the deceased's true intention or if they think there's less money for their share than they think there should be. "But legally, it's the trustee that has control, and the beneficiary is just the recipient," Rapp said.

When there's conflict,it's usually because of a mismatch of expectations. Things can get ugly quickly. Trusts are usually written in very conditional, flexible language to account for all future possible scenarios and last through several generations of trustees and beneficiaries.

Amanda Rieman Sarago, an estate planning attorney with the Hargrove Firm, said that trusts today are designed to last 300 or more years. "That would be like Shakespeare creating a trust and it still exists today," she said. "It really highlights that a trust that can last for a long time has to be very flexibible."

The terms of the trust dictate what can and cannot be done, and if the trust is silent on a particular disputed issue, then the parties would either have to negotiate the issue or go to court. Sarago said she had, thankfully, not had any trust disputes go to court in her practice, but plenty were renegotiated over time.

In the case of a beneficiary demanding more money, that would be spelled out in the trust documents. The first step an unsatisfied heir might make is to demand the removal of the trustee that turned them down. The result would also depend on the trust document.

The trust may specify that all the beneficiaries have to agree to any changes, or that a panel has to concur that certain conditions are met, or else a court may have to find malfeasance. The trust may specify what happens next if a trustee is removed. It's unlikely that the beneficiary who raised the issue would be named trustee in their place. The trust would have a procedure instead for going to the next person in line in the trust document, or it could specify that the role needs to be filled by a professional trustee.

For trusts that are not ongoing, like one that is set up just to pass a house and some assets on to the next generation and then be dissolved immediately, this is less of an issue. But it still bears consideration, because if you're preparing your estate plan in your 40s, and you die in your 80s, some of the people you picked might not be available.

One advantage of naming an entity like a professional trust company in this role is continuity. If you fill your successor trustee list with family members and the trust keeps going for decades, you may run into a longevity issue. They will always have a trust manager available to take on the role, and if they cease operations it would pass to another company.

"You can have as deep a bench as you want," said Sarago. re."