Q: Can a lawsuit assume a trust if a co-trustee is sued?

A: A Trustee overseeing someone else's Trust is a fiduciary or someone who manages someone else's money/assets. In some situations a Trustee actually manages their own assets for their own benefit in which case their creditors could usually get at such assets. However, when a fiduciary (trustee) manages someone else's Trust, the fiduciary's personal liabilities should not impact the Trust.

That said, it is very important to make sure that the Trustee is identified as a Trustee (and not a co-owner) of any Trust assets. It is also probably helpful to make sure the trust instrument has spendthrift provisions for beneficiaries, particularly if anyone besides your mom is a beneficiary.

While not legal advice I hope that this general information helps.

A: No, the assets of the trust cannot be attached or reached based upon a judgment entered against a trustee, who is not also the grantor of the trust, and who otherwise has no discretionary right to make distributions from the trust to herself for any reason. In your description, I assume your mother is the granor of the trust, having transferred her assets into her revocable living trust, and simply named herself and you two daughters as co-trustees. A co-trustee does not own the assets in the trust. A trustee is simply a fiducuary agent acting on behalf of the trust for the purposes set forth in the trust -- in this case, the care of your mother. Your mother as grantor is the one with the authority to revoke the trust of take assets out of it for her own use at any time.

Upon your mother's death, however, the trust likely has a distribution provision that distributes what's left in the trust to named beneficiaries, which I assume are you and your sister. At that point, a judgment entered against your sister may subject her individual share to potential attachment by her creditors, but not any other distributive share, unless she was not entitled to immediate access to the funds. It is possible to draft the trust to limit your sister's right to receive distributions from the trust, which would preclude the creditor from attaching her funds, at least those funds that are not paid over to her personal name. For instance, the trust could be writeen to allow the trustee to pay your sister's rent, car payments, insurance premiums, etc., directly and not to her, so the funds never get placed into her

name, thereby keeping them from the reach of her creditors.