Florida Probate Attorney Service Areas

Lorenzo Law represents families throughout Florida in probate, trust and guardianship matters. Choose your city below to see how probate works in your county, what the local court expects, and how we can help — in English or in Spanish.

How probate works in Florida

Florida probate is a county-level court process. An estate is opened in the circuit court for the county where the person lived when they died — Miami-Dade cases go to the Eleventh Circuit, Broward to the Seventeenth, and so on across the state’s twenty circuits. If the person lived outside Florida but owned property here, the estate is opened where that property sits, through a separate process called ancillary probate.

That county-by-county structure is why local knowledge matters. The statute is the same everywhere in Florida, but filing conventions, how quickly a judge signs an order, and what a particular division expects in a petition all vary. A case that moves in eight months in one county can take twelve in another.

The three routes an estate can take

Formal administration is the standard process. A personal representative is appointed, letters of administration are issued, creditors are noticed, assets are inventoried, and the estate is distributed and closed. It is required whenever someone needs court authority to act — to sell real property, run or wind down a business, or defend a claim. Our guide to the Florida probate process sets out each stage in order.

Summary administration is the short route, available where the probate estate subject to administration is worth $75,000 or less, or where the person died more than two years ago. No personal representative is appointed in the usual sense; the court can enter an order distributing assets directly. It is faster and cheaper, but it is not available for every estate and it offers less protection where creditors or disputes are a real possibility. See summary administration in Florida.

No probate at all. A surprising number of estates never need to be opened. Property held jointly with rights of survivorship, accounts with a valid beneficiary designation, and anything already titled in a trust pass outside the process. Before assuming you need a case, it is worth reading when probate is not necessary and our page on Florida non-probate assets.

How long it takes and what it costs

The single fixed constraint is the creditor period: three months from first publication of the notice to creditors, and it cannot be shortened. In practice a straightforward formal administration runs somewhere between six months and a year. Estates with contested issues, out-of-state property, a business interest or an unclear asset picture run longer. Our guides on how long probate takes and the cost of probate in Florida deal with both questions directly.

Two things reliably slow an estate down, and both are avoidable. The first is an incomplete picture of what the person actually owned — accounts nobody knew about, a policy with a stale beneficiary, property in another state. The second is a disagreement between beneficiaries that surfaces after the personal representative has already been appointed and has started acting.

If you are the personal representative

The role carries real fiduciary duties: identifying and safeguarding assets, dealing properly with creditor claims, keeping beneficiaries informed, and accounting for everything that moves. Florida also restricts who may serve — an out-of-state individual generally must be related to the decedent, which catches many families by surprise. We cover that in serving as an out-of-state executor in Florida, and the appointment question more generally in selecting executors under Florida probate law.

Rights that often surprise families

Florida gives a surviving spouse protections that override the will in several respects, including the elective share. Homestead property has its own constitutional descent rules and cannot always be left as the will directs. Certain property is exempt from creditor claims entirely — see what assets are exempt from probate. Our page on surviving spouse rights in Florida pulls these together.

Where beneficiaries disagree, or a personal representative is not acting properly, the matter becomes probate litigation. Where someone is losing capacity and no advance planning is in place, it becomes adult guardianship.

Probate by county

We publish a detailed page for each of the counties where most of our work sits: Miami-Dade, Broward, Palm Beach and Central Florida, with the three southern counties also covered together on our South Florida probate attorney page. Each explains where cases are filed locally and what that court expects. The full city directory follows below.