Breach of Fiduciary Duty Attorneys
When someone in a position of trust abuses it, the law provides serious remedies. We pursue them.
What is a fiduciary duty?
A fiduciary duty is the highest obligation the law imposes: the duty to act in someone else’s best interest, ahead of your own. Trustees owe it to beneficiaries. Executors owe it to heirs. Officers, directors, and managing partners owe it to their companies. Certain agents owe it to the people they represent. When a fiduciary self-deals, hides information, mismanages assets, or diverts opportunities, the damage is often severe precisely because the victim trusted them—and the victim didn’t watch closely. Texas courts treat these breaches seriously, with remedies that can include disgorgement of profits, removal, and in egregious cases punitive damages.
Trustee duty: trustee mismanagement, self-dealing, and failure to account
If you’re the beneficiary of a trust, the trustee works for you. Warning signs of a problem: the trustee won’t provide an accounting, distributions have stopped or become erratic, trust assets are being sold to insiders or “borrowed,” or the trustee treats trust property as their own. Texas law entitles beneficiaries to information and gives courts broad power to compel accountings, surcharge trustees for losses, remove them, and unwind improper transactions. These cases often involve family members, which makes them painful, but waiting rarely makes them better. We represent beneficiaries in trustee misconduct cases throughout Denton County and North Texas.
Company/corporate fiduciary duty
Inside a business, the people in control owe duties to the company. Texas law protects the “best interest of the company” over its individual members, so proving a breach of a duty becomes incredibly difficult. Every detail matters, every relationship matters, and the damage(s) must be argued perfectly. If not, the case will be dismissed because the claim focuses more on the damage to the individual owner/member rather than the company itself.
We handle both sides of these cases, defending corporate officers acting within their business judgment to protect and preserve the company, as well as the members who are being wrongly pushed out of the company they helped build.
If you have run into a situation where you are being accused of mismanagement, or you are the member/shareholder watching someone else take advantage of their position within your company, contact us to learn your rights and options.