Most will contests fail, and they usually fail for the same reason: the family members who bring them are certain something improper happened, but merely believing something with certainty is not evidence. In October 2026, the New Jersey Appellate Division decided two will contests within a week of each other. The families, the facts, and the legal theories were different. The outcomes were identical — both wills stood, and both contests were thrown out before trial. Read together, the two cases are a practical guide to what New Jersey courts actually require before they set aside a will.
What You Have to Prove
A will that has been admitted to probate starts with the presumption that it is valid and that the person who signed it was of sound mind. The burden of proof sits on the person challenging it.
The most common ground is undue influence. New Jersey defines it as a "mental, moral, or physical exertion of a kind and quality that destroys the free will of the testator by preventing that person from following the dictates of his or her own mind as it relates to the disposition of assets." Ordinary persuasion, affection, or even pestering is not enough. The influence has to overpower the testator's own wishes and substitute someone else's.
There is one important exception to who carries the burden. If the will benefits someone who stood in a "confidential relationship" with the testator — a relationship of trust and dependence, not just closeness — and there are also "suspicious circumstances" surrounding the will, the burden shifts to the beneficiary to prove there was no undue influence. The evidence of suspicious circumstances only needs to be slight, but there has to be some. A drastic, unexplained change in how the estate is divided can qualify. As the two cases below show, though, contestants routinely lose on the first element: proving the confidential relationship.
The Caregiver Daughter: The Estate of Schneider
Joanne Schneider's 1996 will divided her estate equally among her four children. Her daughter Deborah had been her caregiver since 1996 and lived in the family home, helping with household tasks and taking her to medical appointments. In 2015, Joanne's two sons got into an altercation with their brother-in-law, and their relationship with their mother deteriorated badly. Eleven months later, Joanne signed a new will that disinherited both sons and named Deborah as sole executor. She later retitled an investment account so that Deborah would receive seventy-five percent of it on her death and her other daughter, Jennifer, the remaining twenty-five percent. The sons pointed to a 2021 Adult Protective Services investigation — which noted that Joanne suffered from dementia, though it did not substantiate financial exploitation — as proof that something was wrong.
After Joanne died in 2024, the sons contested the 2016 will, arguing that Deborah and Jennifer had unduly influenced their mother and that the burden of proof should shift to the daughters. The trial court disagreed, and on October 16, 2026, the Appellate Division affirmed in In re Estate of Joanne W. Schneider.
The court's reasoning is the part anyone considering a contest should read carefully. Family ties and caregiving, standing alone, do not create a confidential relationship. What the record showed, the court said, was "the ordinary relationship between a mother and her daughters." There was no evidence that either daughter dominated Joanne or that Joanne depended on them in a way that compromised her free will — by all accounts she was strong-willed, understood her finances, and managed them herself. Nor was there any medical evidence that she lacked capacity in 2016, when the will was signed; the dementia noted by APS surfaced years later. And there were no suspicious circumstances: neither daughter arranged for the will or was present when it was discussed or signed, the same attorney drafted both the 1996 and 2016 wills, and the change itself had an obvious explanation — a mother who had fallen out with her sons revised her estate plan to match. The burden never shifted, and the contest ended.
The $5 Million Provision That Disappeared: The Estate of DelGatto
The second case, In re Estate of Thomas DelGatto, Jr., decided October 21, 2026, added a theory the Schneider case did not have: fraud.
Thomas DelGatto held a fifty-percent interest in the family business behind the Westmount Country Club. His February 2018 will contained a provision leaving $5 million, to be divided among his father's grandchildren — at the time, his nieces and nephew — if his stock was sold for more than $9 million after his death. He renewed that provision in a February 2021 will. Thomas had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2020, and by early 2021 his relationship with his father had reached what his own lawyer described as a breaking point. In March 2021 he directed his attorney to replace his father with his wife, Kristen, as executor and trustee. The will he signed on June 10, 2021 went further: it also eliminated the $5 million grandchildren provision entirely, leaving his estate to Kristen and their two young daughters. Kristen had taken no part in his estate planning and had never even met his attorney until after Thomas died. His own text messages confirmed the design: his wife "has power of attorney of everything and calls all the shots," and his father was "not permitted to change anything."
After Thomas died in May 2022, the nieces and nephew sued. They claimed Kristen had unduly influenced him, and that his attorney had removed the $5 million provision without his knowledge — an equitable fraud claim. The trial court granted Kristen summary judgment, and the Appellate Division affirmed on every point.
On undue influence, the court emphasized a rule that surprises many people: no presumption of undue influence arises when one spouse makes a will in the other's favor, and courts are "extremely hesitant" to shift the burden of proof to a spouse. There was no evidence Kristen dominated Thomas, participated in the planning, or even knew what the will said. And the change was not suspicious. As the trial judge put it, everything Thomas did made sense for a dying man with a wife and two small children: he left more to the natural objects of his bounty and cut out a provision entangled with the father he no longer trusted.
On fraud, the claim collapsed on the evidence. Fraud is never presumed; it must be proven by clear and convincing evidence. The attorney certified that Thomas personally directed him to remove the provision. Against that, the contestants offered the fact that an earlier draft still contained it and that a witness did not see Thomas read the final will before signing — which the court characterized as speculation, not proof. The court also rejected the argument that Thomas's "probable intent" still favored the grandchildren: read against his final year of life, his most recent intent was plainly to remove them.
One part of the case went the contestants' way, and it matters. Even though they lost, the trial court ordered the estate to pay their legal fees — $329,445.40 in fees and $23,887.61 in costs — and the Appellate Division upheld the award. Under Rule 4:42-9(a)(3), when a contestant had "reasonable cause" for challenging a will, the court may pay both sides' fees out of the estate. A provision that appeared in two earlier wills and vanished from the third was enough to make the challenge reasonable, win or lose.
What These Cases Mean in Practice
A few lessons run through both decisions, and they match what I see whenever a family asks me about contesting a will.
Being cut out of a will is not, by itself, a case. Neither is the fact that the beneficiary was a caregiver, held a power of attorney, or was simply closer to the parent than you were. Courts look for proof that the testator was dominated — dependent on the beneficiary in a way that destroyed independent decision-making — and for circumstances around the signing that genuinely call for explanation. Contemporaneous medical evidence matters enormously: in Schneider, the absence of any medical proof from the year the will was signed was fatal, and later evidence of dementia could not fill the gap. A will change that follows a family falling-out or a terminal diagnosis, and that favors a spouse and young children, will usually be treated as an explanation, not a red flag. And as DelGatto shows, accusing the drafting attorney of secretly changing a will requires proof approaching certainty, not inference piled on inference.
The fee ruling in DelGatto cuts in both directions. It protects a family member who challenges a will on reasonable grounds from being ruined by the cost of asking legitimate questions. But it also means an estate can spend hundreds of thousands of dollars defending a will that was valid all along — money that comes out of what the beneficiaries ultimately receive. I wrote about a different kind of expensive will fight in my post on estate planning lessons from a New Jersey Supreme Court will dispute, and some estate disputes can even be pushed out of court entirely, as I explained in my post on arbitrating an estate dispute.
If you believe a will does not reflect what your loved one actually wanted, timing matters as much as proof. A challenge begins with a caveat filed with the Surrogate before the will is admitted to probate, and waiting can narrow your options considerably. Talk to an attorney before you assume that an unfair result is also an unlawful one — these two cases show how wide the gap between the two can be. And if you are making your own estate plan, the best protection against a contest is a will that is current, clearly drafted, and consistent with your circumstances, which is why I recommend reviewing the basics of a last will and testament whenever your family situation changes.