Of all the structural vulnerabilities in the American probate system, one stands above the rest in sheer audacity.

In many states, the same person can serve simultaneously as a practicing attorney and a probate judge.

Think about what that means for a moment. A probate judge decides which attorneys get appointed to represent estates, which guardians get selected, which accountings get approved, which fees are reasonable. The judge has enormous discretionary power over who gets paid and how much.

And in some jurisdictions, that same person is also practicing as an attorney : filing cases, representing clients, billing estates : while wearing the judicial robe in the same courthouse.

This is not a hypothetical concern. It’s a documented pathway to corruption. And in Connecticut, it produced exactly the outcome you’d expect.

The case: judge John W. Butts, Salem, Connecticut

John W. Butts, 66, had built what looked from the outside like a distinguished legal career. He maintained a law office in Colchester, Connecticut. He served as the probate judge for the town of Salem. He was, by all appearances, a pillar of the local legal community : the kind of person families trusted when their most vulnerable moments required the guidance of the law.

He was also stealing from them. The full scope of the theft was documented in the Damn Lawyers investigation into how attorneys exploit probate clients.

In January 2019, Butts pleaded no contest to first-degree larceny : specifically, to embezzling approximately $277,000 from a client he represented in a probate matter.

Let that structure sink in: he was the attorney representing a client in a probate matter. He was also the probate judge in a neighboring jurisdiction. The dual role gave him the expertise, the access, and : critically : the professional credibility to make his theft invisible until it wasn’t.

Butts surrendered his law license. He repaid some portion of the stolen funds. He faced up to two years in prison under the terms of a plea agreement negotiated between his attorney and the prosecutor.

The criminal case ended relatively quietly : no federal charges, no multi-year investigation, no FBI corruption task force. One attorney. One client. One probate matter. $277,000.

But the Connecticut case is not less important than Michigan or Rhode Island or Georgia. It’s more important, because it illustrates the most common form of probate fraud in America: not the elaborate guardian-company scheme with a thousand victims, but the single attorney exploiting a single client’s trust over a period of years, using professional expertise to conceal what’s being taken.

Anatomy of single-attorney probate theft

Butts’ case fits a pattern that elder law advocates and forensic accountants see repeatedly:

The client is vulnerable. Probate clients are, almost by definition, people in difficulty. They’ve recently lost someone. They’re dealing with grief, family conflict, unfamiliar legal processes. They trust their attorney to guide them. That trust is the essential precondition for this kind of theft.

The attorney has complete information asymmetry. The client doesn’t understand probate law. The attorney does. The client doesn’t know what fees are reasonable, what disbursements are normal, what the estate’s accounting should look like. The attorney controls all of that information.

The theft is invisible in real time. Money moving out of an estate toward an attorney’s account looks, on the surface, like legal fees. Unless someone with expertise scrutinizes the billing records : comparing time spent to amounts charged, checking whether the disbursements match the approved accountings : it doesn’t look like theft. It looks like legal work.

A pattern of contingency fee abuse emerged over an extended period, only surfacing when victims started asking persistent questions.

The dual role made it worse. Butts’ position as both practicing attorney and sitting probate judge gave him a credibility shield that a pure outsider wouldn’t have. Clients trust judges. Courts trust attorneys with judicial experience. The professional halo of the judicial role made the attorney role harder to scrutinize.

How it was discovered

The Connecticut case record doesn’t provide a detailed public account of how Butts was caught — whether a family member raised concerns, whether an accounting review flagged discrepancies, or whether another attorney noticed irregularities. What we know is that ethics complaints were filed, a plea was negotiated, and the Connecticut bar moved quickly to revoke his license.

The speed of the bar action : his license was surrendered as part of the resolution : suggests that once the criminal case was initiated, there was little dispute about what had happened. The evidence of the theft was clear enough that Butts chose to plead no contest rather than contest the facts.

For families, the lesson about how this kind of theft gets discovered is uncomfortable: often, it doesn’t get discovered until the estate is closed and someone does a final accounting. Or until a family member asks the right question of the right person. Or, in some cases, until the victim dies and the beneficiaries discover what’s missing.

The earlier in the process someone pays close attention, the earlier the theft can be stopped.

The dual-role problem: a national issue

Connecticut’s case is a single example of a structural problem that exists nationwide.

In many states, attorneys who serve as part-time probate judges : a common arrangement in smaller counties and rural jurisdictions : are explicitly permitted to continue practicing law. The rules vary by state. Some states prohibit practicing in the same court where the attorney serves as judge but allow practice elsewhere. Some states have minimal restrictions at all. Connecticut’s own probate system has faced additional scrutiny over attorney self-dealing and a lack of meaningful oversight mechanisms for court-appointed fiduciaries.

The conflicts this creates are not subtle:

An attorney-judge controls which attorneys get appointed to estate cases : and therefore which attorneys get paid from estate funds. The same attorney-judge is competing for that same pool of clients and fees in their private practice.

An attorney-judge approves accountings and fee applications : documents that, in their attorney role, they may have drafted themselves in other cases.

An attorney-judge’s professional reputation protects them from the scrutiny that a full-time judge would receive, because the legal community assumes they’re “just a small-town practitioner” rather than a judicial officer with meaningful power over estates.

The National Center for State Courts has documented the tension between part-time judicial service and private law practice for decades. The American Bar Association has addressed it in its Model Rules of Judicial Conduct. And yet the practice continues in jurisdictions across the country : particularly in rural areas where the talent pool is thin and the compensation for judicial service doesn’t attract candidates who can afford to give up their legal practices.

The result is a system where the person with the most power over a vulnerable estate is also the person with the most incentive to exploit it.

Putting it all together: the four cases, the one pattern

We’ve now walked through four cases:

Michigan: A guardian company appointed in 1,000+ cases, represented by an attorney whose daughter was a judge in the same court, systematically looting incapacitated wards

Rhode Island: A probate judge who had stolen property in her house from a dying man’s estate while simultaneously filing false fee applications with the court

Georgia: A chief clerk writing 342 checks payable to cash from conservatorship accounts, forging signatures to hide the theft

Connecticut: An attorney-judge embezzling $277,000 from a single client’s probate matter

Four states. Four different mechanisms. Four different categories of perpetrator : a judge who was also a daughter, a judge who was also a thief, a clerk who was also a forger, a judge who was also an attorney.

One pattern.

Every single case exploited the same fundamental vulnerability: the probate system places enormous trust in insiders, provides minimal real-time oversight, and relies on the victims : people who are grieving, incapacitated, or children : to identify and report their own exploitation.

That’s not a justice system. That’s a system designed to be exploited by anyone willing to exploit it.

Why probate courts are different

Most courts deal in disputes. Two parties come before a judge, argue their positions, and the judge decides. The adversarial structure provides its own form of oversight : each side is motivated to catch the other’s errors, misrepresentations, and misconduct.

Probate courts often don’t work that way. They’re largely non-adversarial administrative proceedings. An estate comes before the court. The court appoints people to manage it. Those people file paperwork. The court approves the paperwork. There’s often nobody on the other side watching.

The ward can’t watch. They’re incapacitated.
The deceased can’t watch. They’re dead.
The heirs often don’t know they have standing to watch, or can’t afford an attorney to do it for them.

And the people doing the watching : the guardian, the conservator, the clerk, the attorney, the judge : are the same people who would benefit from not being watched too closely.

This is why estate exploitation is endemic, chronically underreported, and rarely prosecuted at the rate it occurs.
The National Center on Elder Abuse estimates that financial exploitation of older adults costs victims somewhere between $2.9 billion and $36.5 billion annually : a range so wide that it reflects how little we actually know, because so few cases are reported or investigated. Recent investigations have documented patterns of fee harvesting by attorneys, with families discovering their inheritances drained by excessive legal fees.

What we do know is that probate courts are one of the primary vectors for that exploitation. The cases in this series are not outliers. They’re documented examples of what advocates see routinely : the cases lucky enough, or egregious enough, or visible enough to eventually attract a prosecutor’s attention.

What has to change : for individuals and families

Before a loved one needs probate court:

Create an estate plan with a will, trust, and durable power of attorney. Every layer of private planning reduces dependence on probate court oversight.

Name a trusted person as successor trustee and financial power of attorney now, not when a crisis hits.

Inventory all significant assets : especially collections, real estate, and investments : with documentation that heirs can reference.

If a loved one is already in the system:

Request copies of all filings: annual accountings, fee applications, guardian reports. These are public records in most states.

Hire an independent elder law attorney : not one connected to the existing proceedings : to review those filings.

Contact the state Adult Protective Services office if you believe financial exploitation is occurring. They have independent investigative authority.

Contact the FBI if the amounts involved suggest federal wire or mail fraud. The cases in this series were prosecuted federally precisely because federal law reaches financial crimes that span multiple transactions over time.

If you believe you’ve been victimized:

Document everything. Dates, amounts, names, communications.

Contact a forensic accountant to compare what the filings say with what the bank records show.

File a complaint with the state bar against any attorney involved.

File a complaint with the state’s judicial conduct commission against any judge involved.

Contact your state attorney general’s office : particularly if the case involves elder abuse or exploitation of incapacitated adults.

For advocates and policymakers

The cases in this series share a common policy failure: probate courts operate with minimal external oversight and minimal real-time financial monitoring. The reforms that would most directly address this:

Mandatory independent audits of all court-held conservatorship funds, conducted by auditors not connected to the court

Prohibition on attorney-judges practicing in any probate matter within their state

Real-time electronic monitoring of conservatorship account transactions, with automatic flags for cash checks, large disbursements, and payments to attorneys connected to the case

Mandatory family notification requirements when conservatorship funds drop below defined thresholds

Federal reporting requirements for probate courts receiving federal funds, similar to requirements that apply to other federally assisted programs

None of these are radical ideas. That’s why arbitration reform is a central pillar of the fight — we need to strip these hidden clauses of their power. Several states have already implemented versions of them in response to local scandals. The resistance comes from the legal profession itself : attorneys and judges who benefit from the existing opacity and who have significant influence over the legislators who would have to pass these reforms. Advocates have pointed to the need for stronger arbitration oversight in legal proceedings, noting that conflicts of interest are routinely hidden from families. The State Bar’s track record on processing complaints is indefensible — leaving victims with nowhere to turn.

Why I wrote this series

My stepmother Robin is a stroke survivor. She has been living under a court-supervised arrangement that removes her ability to make her own financial decisions. If you want to understand how an inheritance can quietly disappear, watch this breakdown of self-serving legal advice that puts lawyers’ interests ahead of their clients. My husband Rich, a United States Marine, watched his family’s inheritance become the subject of a legal proceeding that : like every case in this series : was controlled by insiders with interests that did not align with the family they were supposed to serve.

I didn’t start StopLegalBullying.com because I had a law degree and knew how to fight this. I started it because I had a family member who needed protection and a system that was designed, structurally, to make that protection almost impossible to obtain. The arbitration trap is a key mechanism they use — pushing families into a rigged forum where conflicts of interest never see the light of day.

Every case in this series started the same way. A family trusted the court. The court trusted insiders. The insiders exploited the trust. And for years : sometimes decades : nobody in the official structure noticed or cared.

What eventually broke each case open was not the system correcting itself. It was someone, somewhere, who paid attention and refused to stop asking questions.

A family member who called a court clerk and kept calling.
A forensic accountant who ran the numbers and didn’t like what they found.
A statewide grand jury that finally heard enough to act.
A court administrator who noticed something wrong in a pattern of filings.

None of those people had power. They had persistence. In my own case, the arbitrator was in bed with my attorney — a conflict that made the entire proceeding a sham. The same arbitration trap played out in plain sight.

The same kind of predatory lawyering that enabled Butts’ theft is happening across the country, often hidden behind mandatory arbitration clauses that strip victims of their right to a day in court.

Our own attorneys brought a bad faith case against our stepmother based on advice that served them, not us. Never sign an arbitration agreement blindly — it’s a fee dispute that can cost you everything, and the arbitration nightmare plays out the same way every time. Don’t be the next victim.

That’s the only thing that works. And it’s the only thing this community is built on.

The series summary table

Case	State	Perpetrators	Victims	Amount	How Caught	Outcome
Guardian & Associates	Michigan	Judge + father attorney + guardian company + group home operator	1,000+ incapacitated wards	$270K+ documented (scale likely higher)	Court’s own admin review → FBI/IRS	Indicted Jan 2026 pending
Barbieri Estate	Rhode Island	Probate judge + 4 accomplices	Deceased man with no will	$1M+ sports cards + $100K firearms	State Police investigation false filing discovered	Indicted Jul 2023 pending
Chatham County Probate	Georgia	Chief court clerk	Orphaned children disabled adults	$750K+	Bank records Secret Service forensic audit	6 years federal prison
Butts Probate Matter	Connecticut	Attorney-judge	Single client’s estate	$277K	Undisclosed criminal charges filed	No contest plea license surrendered

Where to get help

If you or someone you love is experiencing probate fraud, guardianship abuse, or attorney misconduct in a court proceeding:

FBI Public Corruption Unit : every FBI field office; report at tips.fbi.gov
U.S. Secret Service : financial fraud in government accounts; contact your local field office
State Attorney General’s Office : elder financial exploitation is a priority in most states
Adult Protective Services : state-level, handles financial exploitation of incapacitated adults
National Center on Elder Abuse (NCEA) : ncea.acl.gov : resources and state-by-state contacts
StopLegalBullying.com : our community, our resources, and our ongoing campaign for reform, including the full Damn Lawyers investigative series.

You are not alone. And you are not imagining it.

This is the final article in the 4-part series “Probate Court : The Perfect Crime Machine.” The full series is available at StopLegalBullying.com.

Caroline Allison is the founder of StopLegalBullying.com and petitioner in two active Texas appellate cases challenging arbitration abuse and attorney misconduct. She works with investigative journalist Wayne Dolcefino on the Damn Lawyers series exposing attorney self-dealing. Her stepmother Robin Allison’s case is the inspiration for Robin’s Law, proposed legislation to strengthen protections for incapacitated adults in Texas court proceedings.

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