Appointor (and a life of) succession **

Previous posts (including last week), have considered various aspects of an appointor or principal power under a trust deed.

In almost every estate plan involving a trust, it is necessary to consider the best way to appoint a successor appointor.

Predictably, the starting point in this process was to review the trust deed.

Often, the deed will permit the incumbent appointor to have their successor nominated under the will.

Generally, if available, a nomination under the will is the easiest and most commercially sensitive approach to take.

In other instances, for example, where there may be a challenge to the will, it may in fact be more appropriate to structure the appointor succession in a standalone document that sits outside the will.

Any approach is always subject to the deed, which are consistently inconsistent with the approaches available, for example:

1. appointment via will;
2. appointment via enduring power of attorney;
3. automatic lapsing of the role;
4. mandated succession embedded into the trust deed;
5. no appointor or principal role in the first place;
6. succession nominated by some other party (eg a ‘guardian’ or ‘nominator’);
7. no provision in the deed at all as to what happens to the role and no rules as to how appointor might appoint a successor; and
8. some combination of one or more of the above

** for the trainspotters, the title here is riffed from the Morrissey song, ‘My life is an endless succession of people saying goodbye’.