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Wells Fargo Bank NA v. Cook

The trial court erred in denying summary judgment to the trustee of a charitable remainder annuity trust in the beneficiaries' lawsuit for breach of fiduciary duty and breach of contract arising after the trust corpus was exhausted, as the statute of limitation barred some of the breach of fiduciary duty claims, the remaining breach of fiduciary duty claims failed as a matter of law and the breach of contract claim failed as a matter of law.

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These companion appeals center on the administration of a charitable remainder annuity trust “CRAT” that was formed in 2000. The trustee of the CRAT was Wells Fargo Bank, N.A.,1 and the beneficiaries were Gail L. Cook and Lance A. Lipman collectively, the “plaintiffs”. In 2011, after the corpus of the trust was exhausted, the plaintiffs sued the bank for breach of fiduciary duty and breach of contract. Following discovery, the plaintiffs moved for partial summary on their breach of contract claim, and the bank moved for summary judgment on both of the plaintiffs’ claims. The trial court denied both summary judgment motions but granted a certificate of immediate review. Following the grant of their applications for interlocutory appeal, the bank and the plaintiffs now challenge the trial court’s summary judgment rulings.

For the reasons discussed below, we conclude that the plaintiffs’ claims for breach of fiduciary duty that accrued more than two years before the filing of their lawsuit are barred by the two-year statute of limitation imposed by the Revised Georgia Trust Code of 2010, OCGA § 53-12-307 a. We conclude that plaintiffs’ remaining claims for breach of fiduciary duty fail as a matter of law because the plaintiffs did not come forward with evidence to support all of the essential elements of those claims. Lastly, we conclude that the plaintiffs claim for breach of contract is precluded by the plain language of the parties’s trust agreement. Consequently, we reverse the trial court’s denial of summary judgment to Wells Fargo in Case No. A15A0202, and we affirm the trial court’s denial of partial summary judgment to the plaintiffs in Case No. A15A0203.

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