Rollins v. Rollins

The Court of Appeals erred in finding that questions of fact remained as to what fiduciary standard applied in an action for breach of trust and breach of fiduciary duty in connection with the management of a family trust.

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This dispute over trust management and other related issues has again come before this Court as a result of our grant of the defendants’ petition for certiorari. Many details of the trusts and other entities involved in the dispute have been set forth in the initial opinion of the Court of Appeals, Rollins I;1 the opinion of this Court upon our initial grant of certiorari review, Rollins II;2 and the second opinion of the Court of Appeals upon our remand of the case to that court for further consideration, Rollins III.3 Here, we will attempt to set forth the facts and procedural posture of the case only as necessary for an understanding of our holding and, to the extent possible, to clarify and simplify the complicated structure of the trusts involved in the case and the assets held in the trusts. Confusion may result when the defendants are referred to simply as trustees, since there are three defendants, and each of them are not involved in each allegation of wrongdoing. Moreover, with respect to the various transactions at issue in the case, one or more of the defendants may have acted as trustee, partner, or corporate manager. Consequently, in this opinion we use the term trustee or trustees only when referring to that actual status and, otherwise, we refer to the appellants as defendants.

Each of the four plaintiffs/appellees is or was until age 45 when the trust assets were transferred to him or her the beneficiary of a Subchapter S-Trust established by their grandfather O. Wayne Rollins in 1986. Defendant Gary Rollins Wayne’s son and plaintiffs’ father is the trustee of these S-Trusts.4 Although at least two of the S-Trusts have now terminated as a result of the age of the beneficiary, and the assets of those trusts have been transferred to the individual beneficiary, for simplicity’s sake we will refer to the interests originally held in these trusts as the S-Trusts.

Rollins v. Rollins

The Court of Appeals erred in finding that questions of fact remained as to what fiduciary standard applied in an action for breach of trust and breach of fiduciary duty in connection with the management of a family trust.

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