Press Release – New York, NY – December 23, 2025 – Sichenzia Ross Ference Carmel LLP today obtained dismissal of a petition by an executor for construction of will in Albany County Surrogate’s Court that otherwise would have overturned the decedent’s beneficiary designations in her IRA agreement and significantly altered legal precedent with respect to the obligations of an IRA custodian distributing the balance of the IRA.
In the case, Matter of Branigan, an IRA owner had named her close friend, her brother, and her niece as the beneficiaries of her Lincoln Investment IRA. The next year, the account owner drafted a will bequeathing her IRA to the same three people. However, unlike the IRA beneficiary designations she had completed with Lincoln Investment, the will did not contain a requirement that the beneficiaries must survive the accountholder to receive their portion of the balance. If the account agreement controlled distribution, then if a beneficiary predeceased the IRA owner and had not named a successor beneficiary, his or her share would be distributed equally among the two remaining named IRA beneficiaries. However, if the will were to control distribution, the deceased beneficiary’s share of the IRA would pass to his or her own estate, not to the other beneficiaries of the IRA.
One of the named IRA beneficiaries predeceased the IRA owner in 2019. The IRA owner died in 2023. She never changed the IRA beneficiaries with Lincoln Investment, and never changed her will. Importantly, the IRA owner also never advised Lincoln Investment that she was seeking to have the funds in the IRA pass according to the terms of the will, and did not provide Lincoln Investment with a copy of the will. After the IRA owner’s death, Lincoln Investment distributed the funds in the account to the two surviving beneficiaries under the terms of the IRA contract. When the estate’s executor discovered the distribution had taken place, he filed suit against Lincoln Investment and in Albany County Surrogate’s court, seeking a declaration that the IRA owner’s will, not her account agreement, should control distribution of the IRA.
On behalf of Lincoln Investment and its registered representatives, the Firm moved to dismiss the executor’s claims. The Surrogate’s Court granted Lincoln Investment’s motion. The Court found that unless the IRA owner had substantially complied with Lincoln Investment’s account requirements for changing a beneficiary (unless Lincoln Investment waived those requirements), the IRA owner could not have changed the contractually-agreed distribution of the IRA by a subsequent will, since IRAs are specifically not governed by the laws of wills and trusts.
In its decision, the Court affirmed similar First Department precedent relating to life insurance policies to IRAs, and extended that precedent for the first time in the Third Department. The Court also held that the executor’s position was meritless, stating that allowing the terms of a subsequent will to prevail under these circumstances would “upend the rights of beneficiaries of retirement accounts” and “would not be in the interests of sound public policy”.
The SRFC team was led by founding partner Marc Ross. Owen Kloter, Of Counsel to the Firm’s Litigation and Trusts & Estates Departments, briefed and argued the motion to dismiss before the Surrogate’s Court. Mr. Kloter concentrates his practice in commercial, trust & estate, and probate litigation, and is currently pursuing a Master of Laws (LL.M.) in estate planning and elder law to better serve the Firm’s clients in that area.