The Firm

About Jose M. Lorenzo, Jr.

Jose M. Lorenzo, Jr. is a Florida probate attorney admitted to The Florida Bar on October 4, 2013, Florida Bar number 107002. He represents personal representatives, beneficiaries, heirs and families through Florida probate administration, probate and trust disputes, guardianship and estate planning, from offices in Coral Gables and Fort Lauderdale, in English and Spanish.

He learned Florida probate from inside the courthouse

Before entering private practice, Mr. Lorenzo served as a judicial clerk to the Honorable Maria M. Korvick in the Probate Division of Florida’s Eleventh Judicial Circuit in Miami-Dade County — the busiest probate court in the state.

Clerking in a probate division is a different education from reading the statutes. It means watching hundreds of estates move through the process and seeing exactly where they stall: the petition that was filed without the right waivers, the homestead question nobody addressed until the property was under contract, the creditor claim that was never properly served, the accounting that could not be approved because the records were never kept. It also means understanding what a probate judge actually needs to see in a filing in order to grant it.

That perspective informs how this firm prepares a file from the first day — anticipating the objection before it is raised rather than responding to it after.

A decade working probate files before ever taking the bar exam

Mr. Lorenzo worked as a paralegal for roughly ten years before his admission to the Bar, handling the day-to-day mechanics of estate administration: inventories, notices to creditors, court filings, deadlines and the constant coordination between families, courts and financial institutions that probate actually consists of.

By the time he was sworn in, he had already administered estates from opening to closing. Few attorneys arrive at their admission date with that much hands-on probate practice behind them.

Education

• Juris Doctor — Florida International University College of Law, 2013
• Bachelor of Arts, Accounting and Finance — Florida International University, 2009

The accounting and finance background matters more in probate than it might appear. Estate administration is, in large part, an accounting exercise conducted under court supervision — marshalling assets, valuing them as of the date of death, tracking income and expenses through the administration, and producing an accounting a judge and the beneficiaries will both accept.

Credentials at a glance

Florida Bar number	107002
Admitted	October 4, 2013
Judicial clerkship	Hon. Maria M. Korvick, Probate Division, Eleventh Judicial Circuit, Miami-Dade County
Law school	Florida International University College of Law, J.D. 2013
Undergraduate	Florida International University, B.A. Accounting and Finance, 2009
Prior experience	Approximately ten years as a probate paralegal
Languages	English and Spanish
Offices	Coral Gables and Fort Lauderdale, Florida

What this firm handles

• Probate administration — formal administration, summary administration, and ancillary administration for out-of-state and overseas decedents who owned Florida property
• Probate litigation — will contests, disputes among beneficiaries, and removal or surcharge of personal representatives
• Trust administration and trust disputes
• Guardianship — establishing and administering guardianships for minors and incapacitated adults
• Estate planning — wills, revocable trusts, and the homestead and elective-share planning specific to Florida law

Representation in Spanish

Mr. Lorenzo is bilingual and the firm represents Spanish-speaking families throughout Florida. That matters in probate more than in most areas of law, because Florida’s rules are genuinely different from the inheritance systems most Spanish-speaking clients grew up with. Florida has no forced heirship and no system of thirds — there is testamentary freedom, limited chiefly by the surviving spouse’s elective share (Fla. Stat. §§ 732.201–732.2155) and by the homestead restrictions in Article X, Section 4 of the Florida Constitution.

Families who assume the law works the way it did in their home country routinely make planning decisions that Florida courts will not honour. A large part of this practice is correcting that assumption before it becomes a dispute.

Contact

Coral Gables: (305) 224-6811 · Fort Lauderdale: (954) 371-0402 · jml@lorenzolaw.com