Wells Fargo Bank v. Cornell CA4/3

Filed 8/19/15 Wells Fargo Bank v. Cornell CA4/3

NOT TO BE PUBLISHED IN OFFICIAL REPORTS California Rules of Court, rule 8.1115(a), prohibits courts and parties from citing or relying on opinions not certified for publication or ordered published, except as specified by rule 8.1115(b). This opinion has not been certified for publication or ordered published for purposes of rule 8.1115.

IN THE COURT OF APPEAL OF THE STATE OF CALIFORNIA

FOURTH APPELLATE DISTRICT

DIVISION THREE

WELLS FARGO BANK N.A., as Executor, etc., G049748 Respondent, (Super. Ct. No. 30-2009-00295093) v. OPINION JANET CORNELL,

Appellant;

WELLS FARGO BANK, N.A. as Trustee, etc.,

Real Party in Interest and Respondent.

Appeal from a judgment of the Superior Court of Orange County, David R. Chaffee, Judge. Affirmed. Law Office of John Devine and John Devine for Appellant. Jeffer Mangels Butler & Mitchell, Neil C. Erickson and Susan Allison for Real Party in Interest and Respondent. * * *

This is the companion appeal to case No. G049747, and is based on the same underlying facts and addresses many of the same issues. In the interests of brevity, we shall not repeat the facts or address the issues where the two cases are identical. That leaves only a few issues for this appeal, which relate to the petition filed by Janet Cornell (Janet) 1 for approval of a trust accounting of the trust we referred to in the companion case as Trust A.2 The trial court denied Janet’s petition and surcharged her for approximately $1.2 million, the details of which we shall discuss below. The court ordered to pay these amounts to Wells Fargo Bank, NA (Wells Fargo), the current trustee of Trust A. Janet argues she was never trustee of Trust A and the surcharges were improperly imposed. We disagree and therefore affirm the judgment. I FACTS We refer the reader to the statement of facts in the companion case.3 We shall add additional facts as relevant in our discussion.

1 We refer to the parties by their first names for the ease of the reader. No disrespect is intended. (In re Marriage of Smith (1990) 225 Cal.App.3d 469, 475-476, fn. 1.)