Matthew McMurtrey

Practice Areas

Trust, estate, conservatorship, probate litigation and appeals.

Experience

Matthew W. McMurtrey focuses his practice exclusively on trusts and estates litigation. His practice includes litigation at all levels of California's judicial system. He has successfully tried matters before the Probate Department of the Superior Court and has also handled appeals before several districts of the California Court of Appeal, resulting in multiple published appellate decisions.

Mr. McMurtrey serves as an advocate for a spectrum of clients, including high-net-worth institutions and individuals seeking to defend their claims and enforce their rights. His result-oriented approach offers each client an honest, unbiased, and realistic assessment of his or her case.

Representative examples of Mr. McMurtrey's practice include prosecuting and defending will and trust contests, pursuing creditor's claims in decedents' estates, seeking interpretation of wills and trusts, and prosecuting and defending surcharge claims against trustees. Mr. McMurtrey has successfully represented a trustee petitioner at trial, and respondent on appeal, in an action to determine that her efforts to reform a trust to correct a drafting error would not be a contest. In another case, he successfully defended a trustee against a surcharge petition and obtained court approval of the trustee's voluminous accounting (approximately 5,000 pages) based on the Uniform Prudent Investor Act.

Professional Memberships

An active member of the legal community, Mr. McMurtrey is a Fellow of the American College of Trust and Estate Counsel, served as the California Lawyer's Association Trusts and Estates Section 2021-22 Chair of the Executive Committee (TEXCOM) and a former Chair of TEXCOM's Litigation Subcommittee. He is a prior Chair of the Executive Committee of the Los Angeles County Bar Trusts and Estates Law Section. Mr. McMurtrey is also a member of the International Network of Boutique and Independent Law Firms (INBLF), a network of highly credentialed single-discipline boutique law firms, across the United States and Canada. He previously served as Co-Editor-in-Chief of the Trusts and Estates Quarterly, a publication of the Trusts and Estates Section of the California Lawyer's Association, and is a former trustee of the Los Angeles County Bar Association.

Awards

Education