A beneficiary demands a formal accounting, and the room reads it as the opening shot of a lawsuit. The trustee’s counsel hears an allegation of misconduct. The trustee, who has done nothing wrong and has been doing this job for free on top of a full-time life, hears an insult from a brother who has never once asked how any of it works.

Almost always, something simpler is happening. Somebody wants to know where the money went.

I approved accountings for ten years, and the pattern was consistent enough to be useful. The petitions that turned into real litigation were rarely the ones where the numbers were wrong. They were the ones where the numbers had never been explained.

Consider the position each side is actually in. The fiduciary holds every fact: the statements, the invoices, the reason the farm sold for less than the appraisal, the explanation for the transfer in March that looks strange and is not. Sharing all of that takes work, and the work is unpaid, so the natural instinct is to share a summary and expect it to be accepted. The beneficiary holds nothing. They have a death, a document they did not draft, a sibling now in control of the family’s money, and eighteen months of quiet.

Suspicion does not require evidence. It only requires a vacuum, and silence supplies one reliably.

That is what makes these cases so expensive relative to what is actually in dispute. A forensic accounting in a modest estate can cost more than the item anyone is arguing about, and in a contested administration it is frequently paid twice, by two sets of experts, out of the same estate. Both sides are then poorer, and the underlying question, which was answerable in an afternoon, has still not been answered.

So the most productive hour of a mediation in a fiduciary case is often not a negotiation at all. It is an explanation.

I ask the fiduciary, early and privately, to walk me through the administration as if I knew nothing. Not the defense. The story. What was in the estate, what had to be sold and why, what the professionals cost, what went wrong that no one anticipated. It rarely takes long, and it is usually more coherent than anything in the pleadings, because it is the first time anyone has asked for the narrative rather than the numbers.

Then I ask what it would cost to say all of that to the other side.

The answer is often pride, and pride is expensive here. The fiduciary has by then spent months being treated as a suspect and does not want to look like they are justifying themselves. That is the moment to be plain with them: the explanation is going to be produced either way. The only question is whether it is produced now, in a room, at no cost, or in eighteen months through an expert whose bill the estate pays.

What follows, when it works, is a trade the parties did not know was available. Information for peace. The fiduciary produces a full informal accounting on an agreed scope. The beneficiary, having received it, gives a release. Sometimes a sum changes hands as well, and it is often smaller than what was demanded, because most of what was demanded was never really about the sum.

The first is that sometimes there is a problem. A fiduciary did borrow from the trust, or paid themselves a fee nobody agreed to, or let a brother live in the house rent free for four years. A mediator who assumes every accounting dispute is a communication failure will be wrong often enough to do harm. The point is not that the beneficiary is always mistaken. The point is that nobody can tell which case they are in until the information moves, and moving the information is the cheapest thing on the menu. It sorts the two kinds of case for the price of an afternoon.

The second is that the exchange has to be real. A curated summary designed to survive scrutiny will be read as exactly that, and it will cost more credibility than saying nothing would have. If a fiduciary is not prepared to open the administration, they should not make a gesture at it. Counsel should scope this deliberately before the session: what documents, for what period, in what form, produced by when, and whether an accountant is retained jointly rather than twice. Where the fiduciary is a bank or trust company, the same exchange takes a different shape, and the institution’s own concerns come into the room with it.

None of this is legal advice for any particular matter, and the standards governing a fiduciary’s duty to account are statutory and belong to the parties’ lawyers. But I watched a great many administrations from the bench, and the ones that ended in litigation rarely began with a theft. They began with a fiduciary who was busy, doing their best, and quite certain that they did not owe anyone an explanation.

They did. It would have been cheap.